This blog is a follow-on to an earlier post about a Social Lab that was conducted as part of the three-year USAID-funded Local Organizations—Movement Towards Self-Reliance (LO-MTSR) activity implemented by The Cloudburst Group (Cloudburst) and their two major partners, Partners Global and the DevLab@Duke University. LO-MTSR aimed to increase the organizational resiliency of Cambodian civil society organizations (CSOs). One method …
Highlighting Learning Journeys for 3 Social Lab Teams in Cambodia
These activities are being conducted as part of the three-year USAID-funded Local Organizations—Movement Towards Self-Reliance (LO-MTSR) activity implemented by The Cloudburst Group (Cloudburst) and their two major partners, PartnersGlobal and the DevLab@Duke University. LO-MTSR aims to increase the organizational resiliency of Cambodian civil society organizations (CSOs) across the health, education, food security, environment, and democracy, human rights, and governance sectors …
Introducing Dynamic Reporting for Strengthening Development Ecosystems
Three and a half years ago, Root Change launched the Pando platform. Using collective intelligence to crowdsource relationship and feedback data, Pando is an online participatory network mapping tool that makes it possible to visualize, learn from, and engage with the systems where you work. The technology is the culmination of more than a decade of experience providing training and …
What We’ve Learned from Piloting the Community Independence Initiative in 3 Countries
Almost two years ago, we announced the launch of the Community Independence Initiative (CII) and the start of pilots in Mexico, Colombia, and the Philippines in partnership with Children International. The pilots were an effort to identify new approaches for improving the well-being of children, and to learn about the benefits of CII for families, children, and INGOs alike. To …
Ushirika Hub: How Three Organizations Came Together to Conduct Participatory SSNA of the Cooperative Ecosystem in 6 Counties in Kenya
Contributions from: Tindi Sitati and Pamela Kaburu (Global Communities), Lydia Omamo and Virginia Brown(NCBA CLUSA), Fridah Kanana(WOCCU) Starting in 2019, three implementing partners of the USAID Cooperative Development Program (CDP), Global Communities, NCBA CLUSA, and WOCCU, joined forces to conduct a Social Systems Network Analysis (SSNA) in Kenya with support from Root Change. The CDP partners were interested in understanding …
The Root Change “Pracademic” – What We’ve Learned from Bridging the Academic-Practitioner Divide in Partnership with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI)
As an INGO whose staff works to design, implement, and iterate programs, projects, and initiatives around the world, by most accounts Root Change is a practitioner. But sometimes we dip our toes into the academic side of the international development field. This is evident in our mission to “question assumptions” and “think deeply” but tends to be our behind-the-scenes work. …
Participatory Systems Approaches to Advocacy in Nigeria: A Three-Volume Series
From 2014 to 2018 the Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SACE) project in Nigeria sought to build a stronger, more resilient, and more nimble Nigerian civil society by strengthening the capacities of civil society actors to form common agendas, coordinate strategies, align outcome measurements, and share knowledge. SACE organized 18 clusters of civil society organizations working on clearly-defined thematic issue areas with …
Measuring Local Ownership in International Development Projects
This post was originally published by MERL Tech on December 17, 2019. It is the result of an opportunity to present a five-minute Lightning Talk on Pando LLS at the MERL Tech DC conference in Sept 2019. “Localization”, measuring local ownership, USAID’s Journey to Self-Reliance… We’re all talking about these ideas and policies, and trying to figure out how to …