Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Plan for Nuru Nigeria
Author: Ray Marshall Center
Date: November 2018
Publication Type: Report, 33pp.
This report is commissioned by Nuru International.

OVERVIEW
Nuru International’s mission is to eradicate extreme poverty in fragile rural areas to build communities resilient to violent extremism.  Nuru International considers fragile states to continue to be a source of instability and relative deprivation in the world.  Vulnerabilities in marginalized communities are ripe for exploitation by violent extremist groups and ideologies.  Nuru International envisions a world in which all people live in an enabled environment with lasting, meaningful choices.  Free of the burdens of vulnerabilities that threaten the stability and resilience of households and communities, people will be able to thrive and to exercise their agency.

Nuru International believes that building resilient communities is best done by local leaders who produce and manage programs locally and nationally, combining and leveraging their knowledge, innovation and experience with international and expatriate expertise, support and resources.  Nuru International is committed to eliminating extreme poverty through investments in self-sustaining and scalable interventions.

Nuru’s integrated development model takes a holistic approach to address the most prevalent and fundamental challenges of extreme poverty through an intentional and co-creative design process.  By addressing vulnerabilities in an integrated way, Nuru enables individuals not just to improve their own well-being and climb out of the poverty trap, but also to avoid falling back into poverty.  Without a holistic approach to development, well-intentioned reforms and investment in one sector risk being squandered because they are not supported by measures in other sectors.

The Ray Marshall Center (RMC), an organized research unit in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas, is providing technical assistance to support Nuru’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts.  The RMC’s experience and expertise supports Nuru’s work by demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of its integrated approach to addressing poverty.

Nuru Nigeria 2023 Endline Impact Report
Authors:  Heath Prince, Thomas Boswell, and Ashweeta Patnaik (Ray Marshall Center);  Bless Jima, Olayinka Orefunwa, and Amos Emmanuel (Nuru Nigeria);  Matt Lineal, Casey Harrison, and Ian Schwenke (Nuru International);  and Dena Bunnel (Doctoral Candidate, Kansas State University)
Date:  December 2023
Publication Type:  Report, 77pp.
This report is commissioned by Nuru International.

INTRODUCTION
This endline report shares the outcomes from the 4-year randomized control trial impact evaluation of Nuru Nigeria’s interventions, from 2019 to 2023 in northeastern Nigeria.  Nuru Nigeria’s vision is to cultivate lasting, meaningful choices in the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world.  By 2030, Nuru Nigeria intends to build resilient corridors of functioning locally-owned farmer cooperatives and profitable rural livelihoods in 12 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of northern Nigeria proximate to conflict-vulnerable areas.  In implementing interventions, Nuru Nigeria aims to equip rural, vulnerable households to improve livelihoods and build resilience capacities to cope with conflict, environmental, economic, and social shocks and stressors for stability and prosperity within the program implementation period.  This study focuses exclusively on Nuru Nigeria’s work in Adamawa State, the first LGA in which Nuru Nigeria began implementation.

This study tracks a number of indicators for the groups of farmers involved, including various short-term and long-term outcomes.  The primary objective for this study however is to measure resilience capacities and how Nuru Nigeria may affect them using the Nuru model of agricultural intervention.  This study aims to answer the question: “do Nuru Nigeria programs have a positive and statistically significant impact on adaptive, absorptive, and/or transformative resilience?”.

ADDITIONAL PUBLICATIONS
Evaluation Plan
Baseline Report
Midline Report

REPRODUCIBILITY
The authors of this study were committed to ensuring that the findings are reproducible.  To uphold this principle, meticulous strategies were implemented at every stage of the evaluation:

• Methodology Selection:  The study adopted the REAL Consortium methodology.
• Resilience Index Modules:  Modules for inclusion in the resilience index were predetermined before the baseline.  These modules were consistently used during the midline and endline evaluations.
• Survey Translation:  Questions were translated into Hausa to cater to the local audience.  A double-blind translation process ensured the accuracy and consistency of understanding, with the same translated text applied at each study time point.
• Data Accessibility:  The data, scrubbed of any personally identifiable information, are made available upon request to interested parties.  They can be accessed through a gated system, with users agreeing to adhere to usage terms.  This data is stored on a secure server, adhering to rigorous physical and data security standards.
• Open Access:  The initial evaluation plan, including methodological descriptions as well as a dataset to reproduce results and explore additional relationships can be requested here.

Nuru Ethiopia 2022 Impact Report
Authors: Heath Prince and Thomas Boswell (Ray Marshall Center); Tatek Amataw, Biruk Abayneh, and Zerihun Woldesenbet (Nuru Ethiopia); and Casey Harrison, Matt Lineal, and Ian Schwenke (Nuru International)
Date: July 2023
Publication Type: Report, 21pp.
This report is commissioned by Nuru International

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In 2022, Nuru Ethiopia (NE) offered interventions in cooperative and rural livelihoods programming with 18,194 participant households in Gamo and Gofa Zones of Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) of Ethiopia.  The intervention activities were punctuated by a shift in approach to supporting larger cooperative unions and cascading services to an increased number of primary cooperatives and farmers.  The intervention activities achieved the following outcomes:

Cooperative Impact
• NE-supported farmer organizations achieved an average SCOPEinsight score of 4.4 out of 5, demonstrating competitiveness at national, regional, and global levels for agricultural farmer organization businesses.
• 90% of NE-supported farmer organizations have achieved net profitability from their business operations as of 2022.
• NE-supported Hidota Union Cooperative achieved a 4% net profit margin as of 2022, which expands its ability to invest in member primary cooperatives and farmer livelihoods.

Agricultural Impact
• By participating in the diversified livelihood interventions, Nuru farmers were able to generate $411 USD of extra income, an increase of 77% compared to their 2020 baseline value of $233 USD and a continued increase over previous years.

In achieving impactful outcomes for households and cooperatives, NE interventions overcame significant weather shocks related to climate change and historic hyperinflation.  All NE operating areas in SNNPR were affected to a different degree by these shocks.  Still, NE successfully adapted its intervention activities to a new union approach that relies on digital development strategies and union cooperative staff to achieve impact for primary cooperatives and farmer households.  This shift toward lower-cost and higher visibility training and extension services began in 2021 and was mainstreamed in 2022.  This multi-year effort explains the significant increase in the number of farmers NE supported from 2021 to 2022.  In summary, NE overcame substantial obstacles, maintained impact, and significantly expanded the breadth and depth of its programming in 2022.