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Effective learning is a key driver of market systems change, with the potential to enhance system competitiveness, resilience, and inclusiveness. Shifting the Locus of Learning: Catalyzing Private Sector Learning to Drive Systemic Change recently outlined a rationale for enhancing the scale and quality of learning in a system and identifying 10 strategies programs can contextualize to catalyze learning. These strategies are also backed with robust examples from 13 programs doing this work...

This document describes key principles of the Value for Investment evaluation approach and provides guidance on how to use it to design and implement evaluations, using the evaluation of the Youth Primary Mental Health and Addictions (Youth PMHA) initiative as an illustrative example.

Coalitions—groups of organizations and individuals that work together to pursue a common policy goal or reform—are crucial to development. Some of The Asia Foundation’s longest-standing and most successful development programs and portfolios have used coalition-building as an implementation modality. This paper examines successful initiatives in Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Timor-Leste. By delving into each of these, we shed light on this coalition-building...

This paper synthesises the findings of a set of country studies commissioned by the RISE Programme to explore the influence of politics and power on education sector policymaking and implementation. The synthesis groups the countries into three political-institutional contexts: - Dominant contexts, where power is centred around a political leader and a hierarchical governance structure. As the Vietnam case details, top-down leadership potentially can provide a robust platform for improving...

This study mainly aimed to look at adaptive management in the program cycle (throughout Program Cycle processes, including strategy, project, and activity design and implementation) and to look at the Enabling Conditions: how an organization’s culture, business processes, and resource allocation support adaptive management. It explores elements of adaptive management that correspond to the objectives of the study as follows: 1) Assess grantees’ level of understanding of adaptive management...

The CLARISSA Nepal team collected and analysed 400 life stories of children and young people engaged in or affected by the worst forms of child labour (WFCL), particularly in the “Adult Entertainment” sector in Nepal, which includes children working in Dohoris (restaurants playing folk music), dance bars, spa-massage parlours, khaja ghars (tea/snack shop) and guest houses. Stories were also collected from children in CLARISSA’s focus neighbourhoods, children in this category...

In order to support the digital transformation of government operations Digital Learning Modules for Civil Servants are available, an off-the-shelf package of capacity development in form of replicable training modules to empower public servants at both the local and central government level to be leaders of digital transformation for delivering better public services. The modules cover a multitude of fundamental areas: comprehending digital government and services, human-centered design...

Sustainable development depends on local actors leading efforts to improve their communities and working inclusively and collectively to see those efforts through. For this reason, local capacity strengthening is and has been a foundational component of USAID programming. Effective local capacity strengthening can propel inclusive economic growth; advance improvements in essential health, food and nutrition, and education services and systems; and cultivate democratic governance. Local...

“Civic tech” broadly refers to the use of digital technologies to support a range of citizen engagement processes. From allowing individuals to report problems to local government to enabling the crowdsourcing of national legislation, civic tech aims to promote better policies and services – while contributing to more inclusive democratic institutions. But could civic tech affect public issues in a way that benefits some and excludes others? Over the decades, the question of who...

The objective of this report, Integrating Local Knowledge in Development Programming is to share knowledge of how development donors and implementing organizations leverage local knowledge to inform programming. In a recent speech at Georgetown University, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Power said, “As Americans with a fraught history living up to our own values, we’ve got to approach this work with intention and humility. But the...

Calls for more ‘adaptive programming’ have been prominent in international development practice for over a decade. Learning-by-doing is a crucial element of this, but programmes have often found it challenging to become more learning oriented. Establishing some form of reflective practice, against countervailing incentives, is difficult. Incorporating data collection processes that generate useful, timely and practical information to inform these reflections is even more so.This paper...

Achieving broad-based socio-economic development requires interventions that bridge disciplines, strategies, and stakeholders. Effective sustained progress requires more than simply an accumulation of sector projects, and poverty reduction, individual wellbeing, community development, and societal advancement do not fall neatly into sectoral categories. However, researchers and practitioners recognize key operational challenges to achieving effective integration that stem from the structures...

Multiple aid agencies often try to support change in the same places, at the same time, and with similar actors. Surprisingly, their interactions and combined effects are rarely explored. This Policy Briefing describes findings from research conducted on recent aid programmes that overlapped in Mozambique, Nigeria, and Pakistan, and from a webinar with UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advisors and practitioners. The research found three distinct categories of ‘interaction...

Locally led development is a complex process that the development community, in the U.S. and around the world, has spent several decades trying to get right. Yet, despite all the experience and lessons learned, it feels like we are barely beyond the starting line. This publication aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on locally led development, especially as to how the United States can address the obstacles posed by U.S. law, regulation, policy, and practice. It consists of two parts:...

Doing development differently rests on deliberate efforts to reflect and learn, not just about what programmes are doing and achieving, but about how they are working. This is particularly important for an action research programme like Child Labour: Action- Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA), which is implemented by a consortium of organisations from across the research and development spectrum, during a rapidly changing global pandemic. Harnessing the potential...

This guidebook codifies the principles and methods of applying systems change and portfolio approaches to complex development challenges with practical tools and examples. It is based on the empirical learning generated from the collaborative initiatives in UNDP Country Offices in Bhutan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Viet Nam with support from Regional Innovation Centre for Asia and the Pacific.

Digitalisation is perhaps the most important strategic challenge that governance will face over the coming decade. The process is delivering digital dividends as well as new exclusions and injustices, with the rapid but uneven increase in access to mobile and internet technologies transforming how social and economic life takes place. This report highlights the key opportunities and challenges arising from digitalisation.

Executive Summary When Christian Aid (CA) Ireland devised its multi-country and multi-year Irish Aid funded Programme Grant II (2017-2022), they opted to move away from a linear programme management approach and to explore an adaptive one. Across seven countries: Angola, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, CA and partner organisations support marginalised communities to realise their rights, reduce violence and address...

Executive Summary Understanding how civil society can get government to respond to their needs, preferences and demands, and deliver goods and services to citizens is a central concern in social accountability initiatives. It is widely argued that sanctions make a key difference to service delivery outcomes, and that without them, transparency and accountability interventions are less likely to be effective and less likely to be sustainable (Anderson et al., 2020; Arugay, 2016; Fox, 2020;...