The IBCR went to Côte d’Ivoire for about ten days to carry out a retrospective evaluation of its project  Strentghning the capacities of Ivorian police and gendarmes in law and Protection of the child, conducted in 2013.

The IBCR pursued several objectives:

• To decide whether or not to continue or develop a certain type of intervention
• To learn how to adapt a successful intervention to another situation
• To learn how to avoid repeating past mistakes
• To learn to be more effective and to improve practices
• To ensure accountability to technical and financial partners
• To inform target groups on how the program is benefiting or not to the target community, and in what ways.

The IBCR took this opportunity to also question its internal capacities in terms of the mobilisation and management of technical, financial and human resources.

The Bureau met the key-project interlocutors in Abidjan and Daloa gendarmerie schools, and at the police school in Abidjan. More than 30 interviews were conducted as part of the data collection at headquarters and in the field, with former members of the project steering committee, or the IBCR trained trainers. Six discussion groups with gendarmes and police officers of the two promotions concerned were also organised.

The rigorous criteria and the methodology developed jointly with Universalia and applied during the data collection phase, have made it possible to obtain information of major importance which must now be organised, analysed and formalised in order to drawn important lessons for this project implementation in the near future, thus contributing to institutional learning.

The mission to Côte d’Ivoire is a preliminary step in  field data collection to inform the IBCR on the impact of its defense and security training projects around the world: the evaluation process will continue its course in 2017 with visits to other Francophone African countries.