Supporting Developmental Evaluation for the Good Fashion Fund

Global supply chains for apparel have a range of negative environmental and social impacts. While sustainable solutions for overcoming these impacts are already widely available, their uptake, particularly among small and medium-sized manufacturers and operators, is often marred by limited access to capital. To overcome this gap, the Good Fashion Fund supports investments which aim at driving the implementation of innovative solutions in the fashion industry. As a social impact investor, the focus of the Good Fashion Fund hereby extended beyond the investment angle and also included providing support to the investees in the implementation process as well as considering dissemination of good practices for positive sector-wide impact. For this purpose, the Good Fashion Fund invested in the adoption of high impact and disruptive technologies and circular innovations in the textile and apparel production industry, initially in Bangladesh, India and Vietnam.

In view of the long-term nature of these investments and industry engagement processes, the Good Fashion Fund required a suitable monitoring and evaluation framework and approach to ensure that the investment strategies stay aligned with developments within the complex system and that the Funds fulfilled its envisaged mandate. Such a complex system is usually characterized by a large number of interacting and interdependent elements in which there is no central control. In such settings traditional evaluation approaches appear not be effective. Instead, developmental evaluation approaches support innovation development to guide adaptation to emergent and dynamic realities in complex environments.

As part of a two-year engagement process, experts of GlobalCad and adelphi worked together with the team and stakeholders of the Good Fashion Fund to design, pilot and operationalise a monitoring and evaluation framework which was based on the developmental evaluation concept. The tasks of the expert team included the fine-tuning of the underlying Theory of Change (TOC), developing indicators and monitoring mechanisms as well as guiding the Good Fashion Fund, its investees and services providers in the roll-out in the three initial target countries of the Fund. The assignment included regular feedback and sense-making sessions in which the TOC approach was refined and adapted to the changing conditions on the ground. This supported the Good Fashion Fund in tailoring its investments to generate maximum impact whilst operating in an economically viable way.