CDA

The Listening Project

The Listening Project has to date concluded six country visits: Aceh Indonedia, Angola, Bolivia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. The reports from Aceh and Ethiopia are now available along with descriptive and methodological information on the project page.

Listening Project

CDA Collaborative Learning Projects (CDA) has launched a collaborative effort involving many individuals and agencies, connected in some way to international aid, to engage in serious exploration of the ideas and insights of people in recipient societies. This project is motivated by our sense that if we could ask for and listen carefully to recipients' judgments of what has been useful (and not useful) and why, over the years of their experience on the receiving end of aid, then aid providers would learn a great deal.

Background

Monitoring and Evaluation are receiving increasing attention from international assistance agencies and their donors. We all want to learn how to do our work more effectively. We all want to be able to trace the impacts and outcomes of our efforts. We all are worried that, in spite of all the work done across borders to support life and peace, events seem to overwhelm results and many people continue to live in poverty and conflict.

As one piece of the puzzle of why well-meant international assistance has not accomplished what we hoped, it would make sense to ask people in the recipient societies how they understand the successes and failures of the international efforts.

Many NGOs and individuals do listen to their colleagues in recipient societies as they plan, implement and evaluate their efforts. However, usually they hear only from people who are involved in the programs they run, and seldom from those who have been excluded. These inquiries focus on recipients’ satisfaction with the specific aid they have received rather than exploring broader and longer-term impacts of the assistance programs. To date, we do not have regular and effective processes by which the “providers of aid” listen to, and really hear, how people on the receiving end of these efforts feel about them. Nonetheless, it is clear that there are many sophisticated and experienced people in the societies where much aid has been provided. They sort among the varieties of experiences they have had, they often judge with care how and why outcomes followed which may not have been intended; they can trace impacts beyond those anticipated. In short, there are many people who can provide information and insight, based on first-hand experience, about what works, or not, and why and for whom in the current international assistance system.

Approach

CDA will arrange for small teams to visit a broad range of sites to engage people in open-ended conversations about their experiences as members of recipient societies. Included will be people who have directly received assistance, people who have not received assistance but who are close enough to the process to have valid and interesting insights about its impacts, and local people who have been a part of the chain of delivery and implementation of aid programs.

The conversations will include grass roots community people, governmental staff, religious leaders, educational professionals, youth and children, women and men, etc. In each setting, the teams of “conversationalists” will determine, in collaboration with local colleagues, how to reach the appropriate range of people for listening.

The teams will report on each conversation in either written or oral form, with the intention of accumulating the ideas and insights across experiences, locations and types of people. A project core group will take responsibility for organizing these reports in a way that can lead to collaborative analysis and learning.

CDA will also arrange periodic consultations in which a range of people involved in the effort can, together, reflect on the findings and analyze their import and directions.

Selection of sites where conversations will occur will be responsive to suggestions from collaborative agencies. When an agency or group of agencies, or colleagues from recipient societies, suggest locations that they judge to be rich in experience, this will for the most part determine where we go. The project core group will select locations that are broadly representative of international assistance experience. The project will gain from inclusion of the broadest possible range of locations and types of aid interventions.

Expected Outcomes

1. Learning whether (or not) there are any generalizable patterns to the ideas that are heard across contexts and types of assistance.
2. Analysis of the ideas and insights to discover what, if anything, they tell us about how to do international work more effectively.
3. Possible clarification of the balance, or priority, deemed right by recipient people of the material aspects of assistance with the “messages” conveyed by the way in which it is given. (For example, learning may occur around recipients’ judgments of the usefulness of participatory processes initiated by aid workers; around how recipients determine the factors that ensure aid with dignity and around the relationship of the tangible aspects of aid to the intangibles.)

An additional outcome is also possible. Through this process, a number of individuals and agencies may develop more rigorous systems for continuing to listen to people in recipient societies as well as a more concrete and ongoing commitment to do so.

For more information, please contact Dayna Brown, Associate Director of the Listening Project, at dbrown@cdainc.com or visit our website at www.cdainc.com

Donors

Public funding for CDA’s Projects is obtained from the following sources:

The Australian Agency for International Development (AusAid)
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Ottawa, Canada
The Department for Foreign Aid and International Trade (DFAIT), Government of Canada
Department for International Development (DFID), London, England
The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
German Technical Cooperation (GTZ)
The Federal Government of Germany (BMZ/GTZ)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, The Hague, Netherlands
The Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway, Oslo, Norway
Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency (Sida), Stockholm, Sweden
Swiss Agency for Development and cooperation (SDC/DEZA)
The Post-Conflict Fund/The Business Partnership and Outreach Group, The World Bank

These donors base their long-standing support for CDA on our combination of rigorous analysis and pragmatic field-level work that delivers practical tools and techniques for field staff and policy makers alike.

Donors

Public funding for CDA’s Projects has come from the following sources:

The Australian Agency for International Development(AusAid)
The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development(BMZ)
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA)
The Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
The Department for Foreign Aid and International Trade (DFAIT); Now Foreign Affairs Canada (FAC)
Department for International Development, UK Government (DFID)
Church Development Service (Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst - EED)
German Technical Cooperation (GTZ)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands(MinBuza)
The Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway
Swedish International Development and Cooperation Agency (Sida)
Swiss Agency for Development and cooperation (SDC/DEZA)
The Post-Conflict Fund/The Business Partnership and Outreach Group, The World Bank

These donors base their support for CDA on our combination of rigorous analysis and pragmatic field-level work that delivers practical tools and techniques for field staff and policy makers alike.

Collaborating Organizations

CDA has worked with hundreds of organizations, both international and local, in dozens of countries.

We will be updating this page in order to offer a list of these organizations and links to our friends and colleagues.

e-mail

CDA staff e-mail addresses are constructed through the algorithm:

FirstInitialLastName @ cdainc.com

Phone and Fax

phone +1 617 661 6310

fax +1 617 661 3805

Address

CDA Collaborative Learning Projects
17 Dunster Street, Suite #202
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA

The Collaborative for Development Action, Inc.

The Collaborative for Development Action, Inc. was founded as a small consulting corporation in 1985 by Mary B. Anderson and Catherine A. Overholt. Both economists, Anderson and Overholt had worked for some years in international development and health policy. They founded CDA, Inc. as a base from which they could initiate and develop new approaches, in collaboration with colleagues in the poorer countries and other international actors that would continually push the effectiveness of international assistance.

CDA, Inc. has been active in health policy, primary and secondary education, rural development, alternative technologies and evaluations.

CDA, Inc. worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to develop a comprehensive approach to programming for women refugees. Over a ten year period, and based on the gathering of extensive field-based experience, CDA, Inc. created what became known as the “People Oriented Planning Framework” (POP). POP has been widely used by UNHCR staff across many contexts to understand, and programme effectively for, gender differences among refugee populations. Following the development of this approach, CDA, Inc. developed a training program that enabled UNHCR to continue to integrate this framework into its operations without dependence on external consultants.

CDA, Inc. also provided the base from which the Do No Harm, Reflecting on Peace Practice, and Corporate Engagement projects originated.

As CDA, Inc. increasingly raised its funds from government and developed the methods of collaborative learning, it became clear that a non-profit entity would provide a better base for this kind of work. CDA Collaborative Learning Projects was created in 2003 as the continuing home for such efforts. CDA, Inc. continues on a small scale to carry out direct contract work, primarily in the area of strategic evaluations.

Catherine A. Overholt has retired from CDA, Inc. and continues her commitment to development by running a reforestation project in rural Mexico.

Our Approach

CDA Collaborative Learning Project's approach:

Is field-based and experience-driven (rather than theory or model-based).
Develops a context and a process in which organizations learn from and with each other more than they can learn from their own experience alone.
Produces tools and approaches that are broadly applicable and transferable across contexts.

CDA works with agencies and organizations that are operational in the field to identify problematic issues of broad concern and to organize the time and space in which these agencies, together, can address their shared concerns.

The process involves several stages.

We gather the experience of multiple agencies in multiple locations through case studies of actual field experience. These are written by individuals or teams who have broad experience in the field, often including local and international people working together.
When several case studies have been completed, people engaged in the collaboration come together to compare and analyze them. From these sessions of collective analysis, we can identify issues and themes that cross contexts and have broad relevance. We assemble preliminary lessons and ideas about how to understand the issues and address programming problems.

Using the lessons derived/learned from the case studies and consultations, CDA organizes a series of “Feedback Workshops”. Individuals and agencies active in the field come together to “test” the lessons against their own experiences and, by adding their analysis and ideas, to hone and improve the lessons learned.

These ideas and tools are widely disseminated in order to be used by people engaged in active programming in the field. Handbooks are published and training workshops are developed to help this dissemination.

CDA follows this process by working, for some years, directly with operational agencies to take these lessons and apply them in their daily work, again adding to the learning and improving impacts.

The approach enables active international actors to learn from our past experience and, using this, to constantly improve our work so that our impacts are increasingly positive for the people in the societies where we work.

CDA does not maintain projects or programs in the field.

About CDA Collaborative Learning Projects

CDA Collaborative Learning Projects is a non-profit organization, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). We are committed to improving the effectiveness of international actors who provide humanitarian assistance, engage in peace practice, and are involved in supporting sustainable development.

CDA operates on the premise that experience is a good teacher if we can take the time to learn its lessons. To that end, we organize collaborative learning projects to gather and analyze the experiences of international efforts and, from this, to identify patterns across contexts and project types. Our experience shows that this kind of learning enables us to avoid repeating mistakes of the past and to continually improve the impacts of our work.

Collaborative learning projects have involved colleagues in humanitarian assistance agencies, development agencies, peace practice groups, and corporate enterprises.

CDA is best known for its development of the peace and conflict impact assessment tool known as “Do No Harm” analysis. DNH helps humanitarian and development assistance workers to identify the impacts of their assistance on conflict and to develop options for minimizing harm and enhancing their positive support for peace.

CDA maintains a small group of core staff who have extensive experience in zones of conflict. They have worked in over ninety countries with several hundred international and local organizations, including European and North American governments, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, members of the Red Cross movement, universities and training centers, and many non-governmental organizations. In addition, CDA calls on a broad group of experts when specific regional expertise or language competence is needed.

The organization’s work is funded primarily by governments and international financial institutions which support CDA CLP because it combines rigorous analysis with pragmatic field-level work and delivers practical tools and techniques to field staff and international policy-makers alike.

Many individuals and agencies know of CDA through its Executive Director, Mary B. Anderson and her 1999 book: Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace—Or War.

CDA Collaborative Learning Projects is a direct off-shoot of the Collaborative for Development Action, Inc., a small consulting agency founded in 1985.

Steps Toward Conflict Prevention

The Steps Toward Conflict Prevention Project (STEPS), begun in 2002, is in the process of reviewing successful prevention experiences. The project was inspired by the widely shared (though largely unknown) experience of communities in situations of conflict who somehow exempt themselves from that conflict. In general, conflict prevention occurs when people do not resort to war or violence even though the context is one that, in other circumstances, would seem likely to cause intergroup violence. That is, conflict prevention occurs at the level of the context and is accomplished by the people in that context.

STEPS hopes to learn if there are any elements that are common to all the prevention experiences that enable us to understand better what constitutes an effective prevention strategy and tolook for ways that international development and humanitarian assistance can support, or promote, prevention strategies.

Corporate Engagement Project

The objective of the Corporate Engagement Project (CEP), begun in 2001, is to provide managers with clear ideas about how their work with communities relates to the broader sociopolitical environment and to develop practical management tools for supporting stable and productive relations in the societies where corporations work. The Corporate Engagement Project will:

Provide managers with a better perspective on which aspects of their operational decisions have direct and indirect impacts on the social environment.

Identify operational options that, rather than feeding into and exacerbating conflict, have positive impacts on relationships among groups and promote overall social and political stability.

Design management tools that will likely lower insurance, security, reputational and opportunity costs and will contribute to establishing a positive legacy for the company.

Reflecting on Peace Practice

The Reflecting on Peace Practice Project (RPP), begun in 1999, involves agencies whose programs attempt to prevent or mitigate violent conflict. Its purpose is to analyze experience at the individual program level across a broad range of agencies and contexts. Its goal is to improve the effectiveness of international efforts to help in "other people's conflicts."

The RPP has developed some preliminary tools for looking at the effectiveness of conflict mitigation programmes, which are laid out in Confronting War. The process of disseminating and testing these findings is ongoing.

Do No Harm

The Do No Harm Project (DNH), begun in 1994, seeks to identify the ways in which international humanitarian and/or development assistance given in conflict settings may be provided so that, rather than exacerbating and worsening the conflict, it helps local people disengage from fighting and develop systems for settling the problems which prompt conflict within their societies.

The DNH concepts are widely used in the humanitarian and development communities and the project has developed one of the best known tools for Peace and Conflict Impact Analysis, the Do No Harm Framework for Analyzing the Impacts of Assistance on Conflict.