Design for purposeful planning for sustainability and scale

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Pathways to self-reliance and sustainability: reflections from USAID program implementation

Proposal

Joshua Muskin is Senior Director of Programs at Geneva Global, a philanthropy advising firm, where he oversees the education portfolio. Dr. Muskin has worked in the education field for three decades, supporting innovation and quality across the sector’s domains on behalf of international and national development operators. He has been a strong advocate and strategic leader in the pursuit of sustainability and scale in development activities, with a focus on government adoption of donor-funded projects. Working as a project implementer, Dr. Muskin has worked on two key fronts to cultivate the conditions for successful life-after-funding. Focusing on project design, he has endeavored to ensure that the associated objectives, strategies, and operational requirements conform to the priorities, plans, and capacities of the government (and other institutions) that will be responsible to sustain and scale-up the intervention after external funding ends. Looking beyond the funding, he emphasized the suitability of the official structures, policies, budgets, and other operational factors to absorb the new project and the ability and motivation of the officials and technicians responsible for this to do so. He has done this both in leadership roles on a variety of donor-funded projects and as a direct advisor to national Ministries of Education. Dr. Muskin has published most recently on the sustainability of development projects, contributing a chapter to The Practice of International Development. On the present panel, he will draw primarily on current activities with the ministries of education and local education authorities in Ethiopia and Uganda to achieve their appropriation of the Speed School model which Geneva Global has supported since 2011. He will also reference his past work in Morocco, which features in the book chapter. Specifically, Dr. Muskin will explore the importance of technical design, cost, evidence, collaboration, systems, capacity, and purposeful planning for sustainability scale from the start of an initiative.

Author

• Joshua A. Muskin, Geneva Global