Pause, Reflect and Adapt: Using CLA to Adapt World Vision's Promotional Graduation Model

World Vision’s food security, nutrition and resilience project, ‘Nobo Jatra/New Beginning’ in south west Bangladesh has a Promotional Graduation component with the goal to create pathways out of poverty for 14,000 ultra-poor women, split into two cohorts of 7,000 each. Promotional Graduation has a strong learning and evidence based adaptive strategy stipulating learnings from the first cohort are clearly identified and addressed before the second cohort begins.This aligns with USAID’s CLA Framework, particularly within the adaptation remit which recognizes that taking the time to pause and reflect on our work is critical to learning and improving performance. Nobo Jatra took a systematic approach to CLA by: i)seizing the ‘window of opportunity’ as a number of first cohort activities came to an end (9 month Entrepreneurial Literacy training) and the second cohort of 7,000 participants due to start, iii)convening and collaborating with participants, front line teams at the helm of activities on ground and all three consortium partners responsible to implement, iii) pause, reflect and adapt through a qualitative field based exercise, a one day pause and reflect workshop and follow up mechanism to track adaptations at field level,  iv) development of a pause and reflect tool that can be replicated and scaled across the project and World Vision globally, v) replication of the pause and reflect activity across Nobo Jatra's Gender and Social Accountability components. Undertaking a focused and systematic learning activity with clearly delineated phases under the CLA framework has served to sensitize and clarify the pause and reflect/adaptive management elements of CLA to Nobo Jatra senior leadership, technical and M&E teams. It has enabled Nobo Jatra to systematically make mid-course adaptations in the implementation of the Promotional Graduation model. A number of positive early indications have emerged, namely that attendance rates have in Entrepreneurial Literacy sessions have improved by 36% since the adaptations from the pause and reflect have been implemented.