Where the rubber hits the road: localization, procurement, and positive deviants

In January 2023, we published a blog on What Changes Local Partners Are Asking For, which 

highlighted a number of operational areas where local partners wanted CARE to shift our approaches to build better, more equal, partnerships. In July 2023, we had Keystone Accountability conduct a survey with partners to hold ourselves accountable to our broader partnership commitments. 

The results are mixed. CARE scored higher than average (Keystone benchmarks against more than 90 INGOs) in soft skills like respect, transparency, leadership, listening, and learning. Commitment to gender equality, and to working collectively with partners to promote gender equality in their own organizations scored especially high.

On the lower end, the operational issues that partners had pointed out in the January 2023 survey showed low scores across the 159 partners in 40 countries who responded to Keystone Accountability in July. 

That’s not a surprise. Steps we’d taken to correct for the findings of the January 2023 survey were not longstanding enough to change the overall tone of the partnerships. However, we did see 7 countries that were performing well in those operational areas. If this was a nutrition program, we’d be calling those positive deviant countries. With that in mind, we dove a little deeper in those 7 countries, conducting qualitative interviews to understand what they were doing right that we should be replicating or accelerating somewhere else. 

Here’s what we should replicate based on what the highest-scoring countries had in common:

• Have leaders aggressively pursue ambitious partnership goals and, and make sure everyone knows what they are. As one interviewee said, “leadership being supportive and seeing partnership as a priority… it makes a difference if leadership is embracing that role.” That flows through to everyone understanding partnership goals and feeling accountable to them.
• Get and keep women in leadership. Women made up 58% of leaders in the high performing countries, and 48% of staff, compared to global averages of 42% and 39%, respectively. Having women in leadership demonstrates that CARE is living up to on our own commitments to equality and women’s leadership, not just in our programs, but also in our organization, especially when we are partnering with Women-Led Organizations.
• Diversify partnerships. The most successful countries not only have more programs run with partners, they also have more kinds of partnerships—especially partnerships with governments and the private sector. For countries that got higher ratings from partners, 58% of partners were civil society organizations (CSOs). For those that scored lowest, 83% of their partnerships were CSOs. When CSO partnerships—especially “implementing” partnerships—dominate, it can be easier to fall into the grantor/grantee dynamic, rather than equal partnerships.
• Invest in the soft skills. The highest rated countries had invested in professional development, mentorship, and other ways for their team members to build soft skills like humility, building trust, and listening, in addition to looking at skills around finance and operations. 
• Partner beyond the funding. 24% of partnerships in the most successful countries were non-financial partnerships, compared to only 4% in the ones with the lowest partnership ratings. Some other hallmarks of those non-financial partnerships included:
  • Having senior leaders available to meet with partners and listen to their ideas and concerns. That made people feel that they had more access and influence than when they could only meet with operational or program management staff.
  • Build mutual benefits in advocacy agendas where there is a shared goal beyond a specific project.
  • Focus on market-based approaches and private sector partnerships to diversify the kinds of partners and relationships. 
• Build your communications muscle, together. Partners commented both on how highly-rated offices put in the time and energy to communicate with them—translate materials, take the time to have multiple ways to share information, etc—but also on how CARE communicates with and about them. Things like planning social media communications together, always having space for both logos and speakers from partner organizations, and crediting partners in reports made a big difference for partners.
• Get flexible. One size does not fit all. The countries that had the highest ratings had to build different kinds of risk tolerance and different administrative procedures for different kinds of partnerships. Then we marry those different tools with demand-driven capacity exchange based on the kind of partnership. What does that look like?
  • Take risks to advance funds (like we do in the Humanitarian Partnership Platform) 
  • Make it easier for local partners to liquidate advances and get new rounds of funding. 
  • Build policies and skills to apply different tools and procedures for different kinds of grants, or different grant amounts. Rather than pushing all of the risk to the partner, we can share risks without tolerating fraud, mismanagement, or abuse.
• Diversify the donor base. Countries with a broader donor base got higher scores from partners, especially countries that got funding from donors that focus on localization. 

What are we doing now?

We’re focusing where the rubber hits the road: procurement, contracts, and partner assessments. We just launched a new set of contracting and due diligence processes that change the game in 3 big ways:

1. Build a two-way street: Now, our due diligence processes go both ways. CARE and partners sit together to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and risks for BOTH organizations before we partner.
2. Create demand-driven capacity plans and operational support. Using the strengths and weaknesses identified through the joint process and assessments, we have a startup pack of tools that help us decide where both sides need to strengthen so the partnership and operations start running smoothly and can adjust to challenges on the way.
3. Vary our risk tolerance. Our new tools build different processes for different kinds of partnerships (something partners very clearly asked for in 2023). Large, complex financial agreements with long term activities get a different level of vetting than non-financial partnerships, or partnerships that may only include small dollar values. That also includes language in our contract templates themselves to reflect different kinds of partnerships.

So what does that all mean? We’re making progress, and we need to be making it faster. Looking at the places that are getting the highest scores from their partners gives us good insight on what we need to scale up and do more of—quickly—as we progress towards a more localized and fair way to do development. We’ve got to put our policies and our new tools into practice, and build the leadership structures that will hold us all accountable to that. We’ll keep doing listening tours, building in deliberate spaces for partner feedback, and checking our assumptions to adapt based on what we learn as we go.

This blog summarizes the paper Learning from Success: Documenting Partner Voices in Select Country Offices, by Amy O'Toole.