Episode 1: How USAID is Hacking International Development from the Inside Out
The USAID Learning Lab Podcast
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Interviewer : Thank you for listening to the USAID Learning Lab podcast. I’m your host Amy Leo, and this pilot episode explores how USAID is hacking international development from the inside out.
Stacey Young : So there’s been a lack of coordination with people who we are ostensibly trying to benefit.
Monalisa Salib: Collaborating, learning and adapting is just a better way to manage.
Alison Hemberger: We need teams who don’t want to just execute against a work plan.
Kat Haugh: Another thing that we’re finding is that CLA is not a one size fits all approach.
Interviewer : Collaborating, learning, and adapting, or CLA, is an approach that recognizes the complexities of international development, and empowers practitioners to use continuous learning and adaptation to strengthen their strategies and programs. In this episode I’ll speak with four development practitioners responsible for shaping and evaluating the impact of CLA.
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I’m here today with one of the people who are responsible for formalizing organizational learning and adaptive management within USAID.
Interviewee 2 : I’m Stacy Young. I’m a senior learning advisor. I lead the collaborating learning and adapting team in USAID’s Bureau for Policy Planning and Learning.
Interviewer : How would you describe CLA to someone who is not super familiar with USAID or development?
Interviewee 2 : I would say that it is USAID’s approach to a combination of knowledge management, organizational development, and organizational learning.
Interviewer : Why do you think there’s a need for this alternative approach to development?
Interviewee 2 : There has been a tendency for, especially assistance that takes the form of project assistance, to end up looking like a lot of different efforts that aren’t necessarily coordinated with each other, let alone coordinated, for instance, with other donors, or with what the host government -
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is doing, or what other actors in the country are doing. So there’s been a lack of coordination. There’s been a lack of collaboration, particularly with people who we are ostensibly trying to benefit in terms of developing our programs, understanding our programs, and their impact. There have been impediments to how well we learn from what we’re doing, and how effectively we share what we’re doing with others who could adapt promising practices to their own context.
So there ends up being reinventing the wheel, duplication of efforts, bad practice continuing because people don’t necessarily know that it’s bad, or they don’t know that they’re alternatives at hand. A lot of missed opportunities for really understanding the dynamics of development, which are actually more complicated than we often like to admit. It’s really hard to know, sometimes, how to be effective in a particular context.
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Then the other piece is just that the way that we managed uncertainty in the past tended to be to develop really elaborate plans, and then incentivize ourselves and our implementing partners to stick to those plans, as opposed to being more adaptable as the context changes, or as we learn better ways to do things.
Interviewer : Can you give an example of a situation in which CLA could have improved a project or activity?
Interviewee 2 : I got an e-mail once from a partner who was working in West Africa. They didn’t want me to share their name, and they didn’t want me to share their story, but we negotiated a version of the story that they were comfortable with me sharing. Basically, it boiled down to work that they were doing in agriculture and food security where they had been prescribed a method to use in the field that had to do with expending the amount of land that farmers were working.
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What they suspected was that it wasn’t the farmers needed more land, it was that they needed to manage smaller plots of land more effectively. With the larger plots the farmers couldn’t spend the time that they wanted because they had to – the plots were cut up, and they had to travel from this plot to that plot to the other plot. They took a subset of participants in the intervention, and worked with them on intensification as opposed to extensification. So improving their farming methods, and sure enough their yields increased, and their livelihoods increased.
They took these results to the mission, but the mission was still in that mode of, “We have a plan. It’s informed by a theory of change. We need to stick to the plan.” They weren’t actually allowed to adapt, even though they were getting new learning about what would work in that context. So that was a really stark example of how we -
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get in our own way when we follow a course that doesn’t really treat our partners as peers, and we’re not collaborating with them. We don’t have the culture in place where we have a relationship where they feel like they can be candid with us. We also haven’t built into our program designs, and our funding mechanisms, and our management methods, ways to be adaptable. So that was one story that really stuck with me about how we could do better.
Interviewer : Thank you for sharing that story Stacy. It really painted a picture in my mind of the impact a CLA approach can have on both the outcomes of development activities, and how organizations operate. I understand that part of your work is to research the extent to which CLA could have an impact on development outcomes. Can you tell me a little bit about this work?
Interviewee 2 : It’s really important to expand how we think of evidence. It’s really hard to gather concrete evidence around -
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CLA’s impact, or its contribution to development because the effect is it’s indirect. We’re trying to build the capacity of people in missions, and of missions as organizations so that they will then be able to do more effective development work. So there’s an indirect impact that we’re trying to measure, which can be tricky. That’s also really tough to quantify. So we’ve been focusing in part on developing better methods to measure and demonstrate the value that we create by focusing intensively, and in investing in collaborating learning, and adapting.
It’s my hope that by developing new methods for measuring things that are difficult to measure, we can also benefit other sectors. We do a lot of work at USAID on things around women’s empowerment, or around the intangible aspects of democracy -
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rights and governance. These are hard things to measure, so I think it improved measurement methods, and an expansive view of what constitutes evidence will benefit everybody in international development because it will get us beyond simply counting bed notes, or vaccinations, or text books, or whatever.
Interviewer :
Interviewee 3 : In the West Africa when we were working with the mission, one of the staff members said, “Basically it’s just the best practices and program management.
Interviewer : In her role as manager for organizational learning and research on the USAID LEARN contract, Monalisa Salib is doing the difficult work Stacy described. Finding a way to measure the intangible.
Interviewee 3 : So the why for us is that so many of us believe, really intensely to our core, that this kind of work makes a difference, but how can we actually show that real research and other evidence, which includes experience.
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So we’re trying to build this evidence base that – to answer the question does an intentional systematic and resourced approach to CLA really make a difference to development. If so, how, and under what conditions?
Interviewer : Monalisa, I understand that your team relates to literature review on the evidence base for CLA. Can you tell me how you went about this research?
Interviewee 3 : In the literature, of course, there’s nothing known as CLA. I mean, that’s something that is specific to the USAID context. Essentially, we took the framework…
Interviewer : Let me interrupt for a second to explain that the CLA framework is a visual tool, you can find it on the USAID Learning Lab, that disentangles the various components of CLA to help you think more deliberately about what approach to CLA might be best tailored to your organizational, or project context.
Interviewee 3 : So things like collaboration, learning, organizational learning, adaptive management, knowledge management, institutional memory,
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all these kinds of things that are associated with CLA, but that’s how they’re known more in the literature. So we started there and we organized the literature view according to the framework, according to the components and subcomponents, and we’re essentially asking, “What’s the evidence, that for example, collaborating makes a difference to development, but also to organizational effectiveness?”
Because our thought was that CLA also has an impact on how teams and organizations function, and so there may be more evidence about organizational impact than necessarily development outcomes. That turned out to be the case because it’s very hard to come across literature specific to development outcomes, and how CLA has affected that. So that’s how we did it, and we have this quite massive spreadsheet of all the components and subcomponents, and where we found literature that fit into the components or subcomponents.
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Interviewer : Can you summarize some of your findings?
Interviewee 3 : Yeah. I think the top line findings are the – even though there’s no comprehensive, quote/unquote, evidence base that collaborate, learning, and adapting makes a difference to development, there are really specific pieces of evidence that support aspects of CLA. So some of those are that monitoring and evaluation for the purpose of learning and decision making is really critical.
Another key finding was the importance of reflection, and how if we just constantly experience without reflecting on it we won’t see changes in our performance. So that reflection has really linked to improved performance. So another key piece was about the importance of strategic collaboration, and how effective collaboration has been shown to improve performance among teams and organizations, but that collaboration not strategically could actually be counterproductive.
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I think that is affirmed by many of our experiences. The other key piece was about donor staff successes linked to using locally led approaches, so this is an emerging area about how if donors use locally led approaches that leads to greater effectiveness. Then the last piece is around how leaders are really key to creating that learning culture. Again, most of this is borne out by our experience, but that piece about having leaders who support an organizational culture around learning and adapting is really critical.
Interviewer : Monalisa, I know that you’ve been working in development for about a decade. Why is CLA compelling for you given what you’ve seen and experienced in your work?
Interviewee 3 : So I think collaborating, learning, and adapting is just a better way to manage. So in what I’ve seen in development over the last 12 years -
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I really started entering the space from the perspective of locally driven and development and how important that is. That’s really looking at the importance of collaboration of local stakeholders, so that’s my starting place, and I think that might be a lot of people’s starting place. So if that’s the case, if we believe strongly, and I believe strongly that development should be locally driven, then how do I collaborate effectively? How do I manage effectively in order to make that happen?
So to me, collaborating, learning, and adapting is just a way of managing. It’s nothing – in the West Africa when we’re working with the mission, one of the staff members said, “Basically it’s just the best practices of program management.” So that’s how I come at it, but if I’m managing collaboratively, if I’m trying to learn from what I’m doing and constantly improve, then I’m going to probably doing a better job than if I weren’t doing those things.
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So to me it’s about that strategic collaboration with the right people, and it’s also about the learning and constant improvement, which is the adapting. So I don’t see any other way to manage. It doesn’t make sense to me to manage any other way.
Interviewer : So that’s what the literature says, but I was interested in knowing what we’re seeing in the field at the programmatic level. What does CLA actually look like in practice, and how does it impact organizational culture and development outcomes?
Interviewee 4 : My name is Alison Hemberger. I am markets and learning advisor at Mercy Corps.
Interviewer : Can you tell me a little bit about what Mercy Corps does?
Interviewee 4 : Mercy Corps we are an implementing partner to USAID, and to several other donors as well. We are a little less than I think probably 5,000 people worldwide,
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and we do humanitarian and development work in 40 something odd countries.
Interviewer : So in your experience, Alison, how is adaptive management resonating in the field? Is it something that people are interested in doing?
Interviewee 4 : We love to talk about the way that we’re driven by the field. What’s been surprising about adaptive management, I initially actually got involved in this when I was in the field, and now in the HQ role, is how strong the apatite is at the field level. So our field managers, when you talk to them about this they turn on to it, they want to talk about it, and they want to figure out how to support it within their programs more.