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