Enhancing Impact: PUM's SEO Evaluation and Recommendations

PUM is dedicated to promoting sustainable development and growth of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in 36 countries worldwide. Recently PUM commissioned SEO Amsterdam Economics (SEO) to conduct a baseline study and provide recommendations for an improved Theory of Change (ToC) and Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) framework. This initiative was spurred by PUM’s commitment to align its strategies with its mission to support vibrant business ecosystems.

Key findings 

PUM’s activities are rooted in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-8 Programme, which focuses on Decent Work & Economic Growth. PUM actively contributes to this goal by cooperating with SMEs through advisory projects by PUM experts, and by providing services to various business organisations. These endeavors impact three pivotal dimensions of ‘systemic’ change: improving societies, fostering better-functioning markets, and enhancing governance.

In collaboration with SEO, PUM redefined its ToC to reflect its vision of achieving systemic impact on enterprises and their employees. PUM aims to achieve this by either bolstering key aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem or joining forces with local and international actors to comprehensively address challenges within the ecosystem. This new ToC emphasizes maturing entrepreneurial ecosystems, making actors more collaborative, and ultimately driving systemic change.

Recommendations

SEO Amsterdam proposed certain changes in the organisational structure and the MEL framework to adjust to PUM’s evolving mission. To effectively implement these changes, recommendations were proposed based on staff and volunteer development, establishment of partnerships, development of ecosystem programmes and improvements in the monitoring, evaluation and learning framework.  The findings and key recommendations can be found in the full report that can be downloaded below. The Management Response represents the actions that PUM has or will be taken to address the recommendations.

PUM’s partnership with SEO to evaluate its ToC and MEL framework demonstrates its commitment to advancing the impact of its activities in support of SMEs and business ecosystems. The report has provided PUM with very valuable insights and recommendations that will further guide, inspire and improve our support for sustainable development of local SMEs.

Please find the final report and management response below:

• Final report
• Management response