Indonesia – Step Up Consulting

March 25, 2026April 19, 2026 mikocanares Asia, Associates, Capacity Building, Consulting Services, core expertise, Core services, Gender and Development, Inclusion, Non-Government Organizations, Training

Step Up Conducts Training for Samdhana Projects in the Philippines

Step Up was engaged by Samdhana Institute, a nonprofit working in Indonesia and the Philippines to empower Indigenous peoples and local communities, to deliver a training on Theory of Change to its Philippines and Mekong team. The training was held in Cagayan de Oro City on 16-18 March 2026, attended by more than 20 participants using a hybrid format – with 5 participants attending remotely from Laos and Thailand.

Theory of Change (ToC) is a comprehensive methodology that explains how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It provides a roadmap for organisations to articulate their long-term goals, identify the pathways to achieve them, surface critical assumptions, and design interventions that drive meaningful impact. A well-developed ToC enables strategic alignment, evidence-based decision-making, and effective communication with stakeholders, donors, and communities.

This three-day training is designed to build the capacity of staff, program officers, and organizational leaders of Samdhana to develop, apply, and refine ToC frameworks. The training employs participatory methodologies that honor indigenous knowledge systems, promote collaborative learning. By the end of the training, participants were able to draft a ToC for a specific program of their choice, equipped with the skills to implement, monitor, and adapt it over time.

Samdhana’s work lies at the intersection of pressing social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural issues. The “common thread” in all of Samdhana’s work is the urgency of dealing with the root causes of the widening inequality based on the non-recognition of rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) to land/sea and limited access to resources.

July 8, 2020July 8, 2020 mikocanares Asia, Consulting Services, core expertise, Core services, Data empowerment, data for development, Gender and Development, Inclusion, Local Government Units, Open Data, Research Projects, workshop design

Working on Systems Mapping with Indonesia NGO Network

Step Up strategy advisor, Michael Canares, works with Konsil LSM Indonesia (Indonesian NGO Council) on a systems mapping research together with Open Data Lab Jakarta to develop a deep understanding of the systemic challenges in affecting gender-inclusive development in the cities of Jakarta, Banda Aceh, Bandung, and Pontianak in Indonesia.

The system mapping research consist of three main components: 1) desk research, 2) interviews with key civil society and government stakeholders in each of the target cities, and 3) system mapping workshops. Mr. Canares was engaged by the project implementation team to design the online workshop using different online tools.

Mr. Canares designed the different workshops aimed at (a) identifying and validating priority issues related to gender-inclusive development in each city; (b) recommending strategies or solutions to gender-inclusive development issues in each city and identify ways in which open data can be part of the solution; (c) identifying and prioritizing skills gaps and data gaps needed in implementing the solutions; and (d) identifying key actors and validating coalitions between actors within and inter-city, including support needed to strengthen the collaboration.

The workshops started in June 2020 and will wrap up in the next three weeks.

May 20, 2020 mikocanares Africa, Anti-corruption, Asia, Governance, Inclusion, Open contracting, Open Data

HIVOS Publishes Step Up’s Paper on Open Contracting and Inclusion

hivos book cover

Hivos, a development organization based in the Netherlands recently published a research it commissioned to Step Up Consulting. The research, done by Michael Canares and Francois van Schalkwyk, interrogates whether open contracting reforms can or can not lead to increased equality and inclusion in public contracting processes.

Open contracting has been adopted by more than 35 governments worldwide and has received significant attention from advocates and researchers alike. According to the organisation Open Contracting Partnership, open contracting has become “a new global norm, recommended and endorsed by global bodies such as the G7, the G20, OECD, the European Commission, the World Bank, and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development”. However, evidence of the concrete benefits that open contracting delivers derives from a limited sample of case studies or single-country research pilots.

The research made use of a case study approach covering 5 low and middle-income countries. The cases covered are as follows:

1. Bandung, Indonesia: an open contracting pilot project implemented the City of Bandung with the support of the World Bank and the National Procurement Agency. The citizen engagement component of the project was implemented by World Wide Web Foundation’s Open Data Lab Jakarta, the aim of which is to cultivate use of published contracting data by the city government of Bandung, Indonesia.
2. Bantay Kita, Philippines: Open mining governance to increase access, understanding and use of mining contract data in Cebu and Palawan provinces in the Philippines.
3. Budeshi, Nigeria aims to ensure that public service delivery in Nigeria is opened to public scrutiny. Budeshi also requires that data across the budget and procurement processes are structured enough to enable various stages to be linked to each other and, eventually, to public services.
4. Preferential Procurement, South Africa: Public procurement regulations introduced by the national government in 2017 stipulating that at least 30% of the value of all government contracts of ZAR30 million or more must be subcontracted to specified disadvantaged groups, including youth and women.
5. Access to Government Procurement Opportunities, Kenya: Public procurement regulations introduced by the national government in 2013 stipulating that at least 30% of all government contracts must be subcontracted to specified disadvantaged groups, including youth and women.

If you are interested to learn more about the research, please download the file from this link.

April 29, 2019June 22, 2019 mikocanares Asia, core expertise, Core services, Facilitation, labour markets

Labour Markets Project Design Workshop for Indonesia

miko in action day 2 Step Up Managing Consultant Michael Canares led the design for the Labour Market Information Systems exploratory workshop for Indonesia and facilitated the same last April 9-10, 2019 at the GIZ Headquarters in Jakarta Indonesia. The primary question that the workshop tackled was whether non-traditional data sources can help overcome information deficits in labour market development programs.

The workshop brought together policy makers from relevant education and labour market related institutions, providers of relevant data and technical experts across Indonesia, more particularly those in the food processing sector, the current test case. The workshop aimed to initiate an in-depth discussion with respect to the following overarching questions:

On which basis are education and labour market policies currently formulated in Indonesia?
Are the currently used data sources enough to serve as a basis for informed policy formulation?
What are known data/information gaps that may lead to sub-optimal policy decisions?
Can non-traditional data sources, in particular, data from job-platforms and social networks, be used to enrich the existing information base and strengthen the evidence base in order to allow for more informed policy decisions?
What gains can be expected from the use of non-traditional data sources?
What are the related prerequisites and the costs related to the use of non-traditional data sources?
What process needs to be in place to develop a system of integrating new data sources to existing systems?

output Through intensive workshops and meaningful conversations designed primarily to harness different ideas, the workshop resulted to at least four experiments in the use of different data sources – big data, open data, thick data, and citizen-generated data – to be able to capture traditionally unavailable information that are critical to labour market decision making processes.