Highest
methodological
standards
Agile and
participatory
Grounded in
operational
expertise
ITAR
Consultants
Supporting community-centered programme design and evaluation
ITAR Consultants is a network of consultants that provides services to a wide variety of actors involved in the humanitarian and development sectors, including non-governmental organisations, development agencies, fondations, UN agencies and public authorities.
Our team combines a complementary set of profiles including academics, senior consultants and former sector specific NGO-staff. Together, they provide the company with the highest methodology standards, cost-effective and agile approaches, and recommendations anchored to the field.
Highest Standards
Highest methodological standards from academia.
Agile & Participatory
Agile and participatory approaches inspired from management consulting.
Operational Expertise
Recommendations grounded on operational expertise.
What we do
Needs assessments & strategic research
Identify trends and drivers of change to inform and support the design of humanitarian and development programmes.
Monitoring & Evaluation
Track and evaluate the success and impact of projects compared to their original objective.
Our stories
Explore our work in collaboration with international and local organisations, conducting research to assess impact and support project implementation.
Besides our traditional service offer, we also propose tailored support to NGOs and foundations
Research partnering from the writing of the proposal to the donor until the delivery of the project
We can accompany NGOs into the design of their proposal to the donor, and further as research partners during the implementation from A to Z. This approach ensures that learning and impact assessments are directly part of and useful to the project rather than peripheral contractual obligations.
Data driven strategy definition and revision
Social and Behavioural Change strategies and products
The company also relies on a long-term agreement with a communication company to produce communication strategies, phone applications as well as Social and Behavioural Change Communications and media content based on the result of our research.
Surveys across the MENA region
ITAR Consultants can count a dedicated team of enumerators in Lebanon who can conduct physical data collection in Lebanon and CATI surveys in Arabic across the Middle East. In addition, ITAR Consultants can rely on several networks of consultants to identify trained data collectors across the Middle East.
Grouped Evaluations
Through our experiences, it became clear that one of the main difficulties for donors is to combine two requirements in the monitoring of funded interventions:
Individual accountability: Ensuring each project aligns with targeted objectives through an individual review.
Global overview: Providing a coherent overview of funding at the organisation level to identify general trends and lessons learned across all funded interventions.
Cluster evaluations help funders meet these two key needs: producing an individual evaluation of each project and providing a global overview. It also ensures an efficient use of resources by reducing the time and costs of an evaluation, which are often underestimated at the level of an individual grant.
M&E System
A specific challenge in managing grants is to be able to follow and understand:
- whether planned activities have been implemented; and
- whether implemented activities have achieved intended results (qualitative and quantitative impact measurement) for targeted organisations and/or populations (direct and final beneficiaries).
The definition of relevant indicators for this purpose can be particularly complex because it requires taking into account several variables:
- the ease of collecting data for indicators monitoring for the organisations in charge of implementing the grants (in terms of time required, understanding of the indicators and compliance with good practices);
- the relevance of the indicators in order to effectively justify results obtained to the board;
- their universality, in order to ensure that, at least in part, indicators can be applicable to all grants in order to give an overview of the activities implemented by the foundation.
This work of defining indicators can be carried out through several activities, in particular: (1) as continuation of the foundation’s work of defining the theory of change; (2) through a documentary review of funding agreements and grantees’ activity reports; and (3) through participatory approaches with the teams, in particular through training or workshops.
This work can be completed by the development of management tools, making it possible to compile the indicators quickly and to facilitate their analysis and representation through infographics.
One of the pillars of success for such approaches remains the appropriation of these systems by the administrative and project monitoring teams within the foundation; and beyond by the grantee organisations themselves.
ITAR has had the opportunity to develop a curriculum adaptable to various situations and specific needs including half-days of training in order to finalise our interventions through:
- introduction to the basic principles of monitoring and evaluation;
- participatory design of indicators for monitoring activities; and,
- handover of monitoring tools to the teams in charge of monitoring and/or implementing projects.
The experts behind ITAR
Our strength lies in the collective expertise of our global network.
Our experience and geographical coverage
