Let’s Talk About Another ROI - the Risk of Ignoring Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting
This blog post was written by Monalisa Salib, Deputy Chief of Party of the USAID LEARN contract.
As collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) champions, you may have colleagues asking you, “well, what’s the return on investment - or ROI - of CLA?” In other words, “why should I invest in CLA?” It’s a fair question; anyone considering a new behavior or approach should consider the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.
But like many other things in life, it’s really hard to figure out the ROI on intangible things like collaborating, learning, and adapting1. While we’ve articulated what CLA practice looks like in the CLA maturity tool, it’s very difficult to go from that to measuring quantitatively the effect or contribution of improvements in CLA practice to organizational performance or development outcomes. This is not surprising or uncommon; work in peacebuilding, women’s empowerment, and resilience face similar measurement challenges. Qualitative data is much easier to come by (see the CLA case competition submissions and the CLA case competition analysis) but do not translate nicely into a definitive ROI message.
So when I first heard2 the idea of flipping ROI on its head, I was intrigued. Instead of trying to come up with quantitative data about the Return on Investment for CLA, what about sharing stories about the Risk of Ignoring CLA?
What do we risk by not systematically and intentionally collaborating, learning, and adapting? What do we stand to lose if we don’t resource and integrate CLA? Based on this (almost comical) development #fail story, the answer is: A LOT.
Activity: Lake Turkana fish processing plant, Kenya. Funded by the Norwegian government for $22 million (1971)3 |
Risk of Ignoring CLA (or where it went wrong): The activity was supposed to increase job opportunities for the Turkana people through fishing and fish processing for export. However, the Turkana are nomadic with no history of involvement in the fishing industry. The plant quickly shut down after only a matter of days. |
How CLA integration could have helped avoid this: It’s fairly obvious that even just a little CLA in this case could have perhaps avoided this fail; implementers would have known more about the Turkana people and avoided setting up a static opportunity for a nomadic people. The risk of ignoring (ROI) here was at the very least $22 million and likely included the reputation and credibility of the implementing agency and trust between them and the Turkana people and Kenyan government. |
While this story could be classified as extreme, it represents common errors we have all seen in development programming: not collaborating sufficiently with local stakeholders, not understanding the local context well enough to design relevant interventions, and not using a “fail fast” approach that avoids sinking millions into approaches unlikely to succeed.
This got me thinking about a thought experiment: what if our CLA Case Competition winners never intentionally integrated CLA? What could have happened? What would have been the ROI - Risk of Ignoring - CLA on development outcomes?
One of my favorite cases from 2018 was MSI and USAID/Senegal’s submission about evaluation use on a Government-to-Government (G2G) activity. Here’s the context: last year, USAID/Senegal undertook an evaluation for a G2G activity that was piloting an innovative national-to-regional funding scheme for health service delivery. This evaluation was well timed to inform the design of a follow-on activity. Instead of a traditional evaluation in which the evaluation team provides recommendations, the mission “CLAed” its evaluation by facilitating recommendations workshops among the primary stakeholders, including both the Mission and the government of Senegal. This resulted in an agreed upon list of recommendations owned by those responsible for designing and managing the follow-on.
The risk of ignoring CLA integration in this case would have likely been:
- Wasted financial and staffing resources on an evaluation that wouldn’t have gotten used
- A newly designed activity that wouldn’t have taken into account learning from the current activity
- Potential tension with the government over how the activity should be adapted to improve development outcomes
However, because CLA was so intentionally integrated into the evaluation process, quite the opposite happened:
- Recommendations were co-created with host government and USAID stakeholders and directly informed the design of the new activity
- The relationships between the government of Senegal and USAID were strengthened - the government of Senegal called the approach used to develop recommendations in a collaborative way “revolutionary.”
There are countless examples like this of what could have happened had CLA not been integrated. The Risk of Ignoring needs to play into our calculus more when championing CLA approaches; it can often be a powerful caution sign to colleagues. So if your colleagues ask you about the return on investment of CLA, perhaps ask them about the risk of ignoring it.
Check out this resource for more information about Utilizing and Learning from Evaluations.
1As a side note, we investigated whether a cost-benefit analysis type of study would be feasible under our Evidence Base for CLA work and found that any conclusions would be heavily caveated, making this line of inquiry not worth the investment.
2Credit goes to Robert Otrembiak during a recent Organization Development Network webinar.