Nearly five years ago, the CLA and the LEARN contract developed the Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) Maturity Tool to help USAID missions and offices think more deliberately about how to plan for and implement CLA approaches. In the years since, many USAID and implementing partner teams have used the tool. They have found it hel...

Pact’s Adaptive Management Guide provides practical guidance to development practitioners globally on the mindsets, behaviors, resources, and processes that underpin an effective adaptive management system. It presents an approach to managing adaptively that is rooted in complexity analysis and program theory. It draws on Pact’s globa...

Read the full, original blog post here.Bringing together diverse stakeholders is never simple, and doing so during a global public health crisis presents additional challenges. However, the USAID-funded Economics of Natural Capital in East Africa project (Natural Capital) has been identifying creative and adaptive approaches to solve such...

Making the Most of Adaptive Management in International Development“Adaptive management” has become one of those pieces of jargon dropped into international development program plans and proposals as an all-encompassing, sometimes throw-away term with little practical meaning. Yet we continue to use it. Why? Because while it often con...

This story is part of CARE's Women Respond series, which is an initiative to learn from and amplify the direct perspectives, experiences and priorities shared by poor and working-class women facing COVID-19 across the geographies where CARE works.Migrant workers – those leaving their homes to find income through a range of work such as ...

A Performance Management Plan (PMP) is a Mission-wide tool for planning and managing the process of (1) monitoring strategic progress, project performance, programmatic assumptions, and operational context; (2) evaluating performance and impact; and (3) learning and adapting from evidence. Each Mission must prepare a Mission-wide PMP...

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Acting Administrator John Barsa has streamlined Chapter 201 of our ADS, Program Cycle Operational Policy, to shift our emphasis from bureaucracy to the real work of supporting development progress.  The reformed policy responds to calls from the field to streamline the Agency’s proc...

This 10-page document summarizes key "musts" (requirements) and "shoulds" (best practices) in the revision of ADS 201 that was codified on October 28, 2020.

“Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” --Samuel BeckettHere’s my favorite part of that quote: the ultimate goal is not a lack of failure; it’s better failures. That’s good news for CARE, because we just published round two of our Learning From Failure initiative, and…I know this will surprise everyone…...