USAID/OTI Shares Tools for Advocacy

USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) proposed a Learning Improvement Project to build an Advocacy Resource Center, including an Advocacy Toolkit,to aggregate the many resources and lessons learned from 3 years of OTI’s work in Lebanon. OTI’s work aimed to catalyze youth activism in marginalized areas, enhance civil society organizations’ capacity to advocate for local and national issues, and assess capacity development over time. OTI also proposed developing an interactive training module to live on the Advocacy Resource Center, which would encourage USAID and implementing partners to think strategically about advocacy and civic activism programming, and share best practices to improve collective activism worldwide.  On September 10, OTI and KDMD hosted a webinar to launch the Advocacy Resource Center and introduce the course to USAID and implementing partners.

Why an Advocacy Resource Center?

USAID activity lead Marialice Ariens said the Learning Improvement Project was “a great innovation” and “a great way to get people to think of what they want to share with the wider Agency.” The original idea for the project came from the numerous requests that Ariens received from USAID Mission staff, all of whom wanted to know more about OTI’s advocacy work in Lebanon.  “I thought, people are interested in this,” but Ariens lamented, “I have nothing to give them but a one-pager.”

That’s where the Advocacy Resource Center and training came in. As Ariens explained, it’s “a great go-to resource for people—especially for field-based folks who don’t have the opportunity to run into someone in the hallway and ask what’s happening in different bureaus.” Citing the challenges associated with sharing information word-of-mouth through USAID/Washington’s “informal network,” Ariens is excited that the Advocacy Resource Center and training are “formalized, and then there’s an interactive component” that allows users to post and share knowledge. For Ariens, the ability for USAID staff to search for this resource on USAID.gov was key, “because if something is searchable on our intranet, it’s easiest to access and more likely” to be used by development practitioners in the field.

Maximizing knowledge organization

When asked about how OTI’s project reflected the Learning Cycle, the framework upon which every Learning Improvement Project was based, Ariens felt that they project was strongest in terms of knowledge organization: before the Learning Improvement Project, OTI had “a 150-page ‘how-to’ document on different modules,” but she noted that it was presented in a very user-unfriendly format. The project allowed OTI to “take what we had in written documents into a more accessible format…it helped us tie several different tools together, and it meshed really well.”  Ariens hoped that the webinar would help spread the word about the Advocacy Resource Center and that it would become a key resource for development practitioners. As Ariens said, “there’s so much knowledge out there, and it’s crazy that people re-invent the wheel without knowing what else is out there.”

Sustainability and potential for replication across USAID

When asked about the project’s replicability and scalability, Ariens feels that the process OTI went through to “give people information in different forms” is replicable and a great. If the Agency scaled up OTI’s efforts, Ariens suggests “streamlining some of these lessons learned across the bureaus” to facilitate cross-bureau communication. As Ariens explained, “there’s a tendency in the office to have pillar bureaus that talk to each other but it’s very difficult to talk across bureaus, and it would be great to see more of that.”

Ariens hopes that the PPL Bureau will offer additional opportunities for “Learning Improvers” to engage in future learning projects. In addition to engaging USAID/Washington staff, Ariens underscored the need for USAID to “invest more resources in trying to engage field practitioners…because that’s where a lot of the ideas are and the day-to-day working knowledge is.” 

In order to contribute to the project’s sustainability, the Advocacy Resource Center, training, and webinar will remain accessible to USAID as well as its partners. 

Explore the Advocacy Resource Center here!

What is a Learning Improvement Project?

The objective of the Learning Improvement Projects is to catalyze Agency learning by sharing lessons learned from innovative pilot projects with the hope that promising approaches can be replicated and scaled up by others for greater impact. Each project must address all components of the learning cycle (create, organize, share, and use) as a way to ensure that the learning generated will not remain with a few individuals but effectively shared out to and utilized by a broader audience. The USAID-funded Knowledge-Driven Microenterprise Development (KDMD) project will provide customized support to all projects.