Moving from capacity strengthening to capacity exchange in education research partnerships

• In Event: Integrating capacity exchange in international education research: an effort to move towards more equitable partnerships

Proposal

The USAID-funded Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education (SHARE) Activity, led by the University of Notre Dame (UND) and implemented by a network of international partners, advances USAID’s global education learning priorities through targeted research across 12 low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Capacity strengthening is both a requirement for SHARE under the New Partnership Initiative and a central element of SHARE’s Theory of Change, in which enhanced capacity among partners contributes to higher quality research outputs and, through partners’ interventions in their countries, increases the capacity of local evidence ecosystems to generate, translate, and use evidence for better education outcomes.

SHARE developed a three-phase capacity-strengthening process with the intention to promote equitable partnerships and partner ownership. In Phase 1, partners complete a self-assessment of their organization’s capacity across areas related to SHARE’s work, such as research project management, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), methodological competencies, and promoting evidence uptake. They also select areas they wish to strengthen, ensuring that activities are driven by partners’ own priorities rather than prescribed, and indicate areas where they are strong and are willing to share their expertise with others in the network. In Phase 2, tailored capacity exchange plans are co-created with each partner and implemented over the course of each partner’s research project, inclusive of formal trainings and mentoring integrated in ongoing project implementation. UND collects feedback from partners at certain milestones through feedback surveys and interviews, allowing for adaptations of the process. In Phase 3, at the end of the collaboration, capacity improvement is measured through repetition of the self-assessment as well as organizational performance indicators tailored to each partner.

In line with priorities based on responses from 15 partners, SHARE focused on capacity strengthening in systems thinking, proposal writing, research communication, and data analysis, in addition to ongoing mentoring in additional areas integrated into project implementation. Specific activities were co-designed and co-facilitated between UND and other partners, for example, CDRI and UND jointly developed and held a research communications workshop, UND and another partner jointly put together a resource mobilization training, and partners in the same region supported each other with conducting systems thinking workshops.

In this presentation, we will share findings and reflect on barriers and enabling factors - for example, the capacity exchange would have benefited from longer-term relationships, which were not always possible within the parameters of SHARE. Also, an honest conversation about an area of weakness requires vulnerability and trust, which can be in contradiction to partners’ perception of being evaluated by a potential donor. Partner feedback indicated that while overall satisfaction with the mentoring was very high, not all team members in a given organization benefited equally with more junior and female team members being slightly but consistently less satisfied. Ultimately, we will share adaptations we are making based on these learnings, and what recommendations we would give to others who wish to integrate capacity strengthening in similar programs.

Authors

• Katharina Anton-Erxleben, University of Notre Dame-Pulte Institute

• Maria Estela Rivero Fuentes, University of Notre Dame

• Sean O'Neill, University of Notre Dame-Pulte Institute