Strengthening capacity for actionable research in education: reflections and lessons learned from the case of Cambodia

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

Proposal

The Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI) and the University of Notre Dame (UND) have collaborated since 2022 on the Learning to Improve Book Resource Operational Systems (LIBROS) study under USAID’s Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education (SHARE) Activity. LIBROS aims to identify the characteristics and critical success factors of successful book supply chain improvement strategies that can be transferable to other low- and middle-income country (LMIC) contexts and to improve research uptake by engaging with different actors in the evidence ecosystem. In addition to progress on the research project itself, participation in SHARE also resulted in capacity exchange and strengthening for the CDRI team, which this presentation will focus on.
For CDRI, the five priorities for growth included the implementation of systems thinking methods, monitoring and evaluation, research communication, supporting research uptake, and solution-oriented research. These priorities were achieved through various activities implemented by SHARE. For example, CDRI participated in a training on how to write actionable recommendations, presented at the CIES 2023 conference, and participated in a training on outcome mapping (a method to monitor changes in the evidence ecosystem). Because not every CDRI team member could participate in all SHARE capacity exchange and strengthening activities, we conducted a pause and reflection session in which we shared with the rest of the team key lessons from the engagement with SHARE activities, in line with USAID’s goal of improving organizational, not only individual, capacity.
Capacity exchange draws on utilizing all SHARE partners’ knowledge, skills, or experience by taking turns to be either a trainer or trainee. CDRI trained other SHARE partners in Kumu (a data visualization tool that helps users to organize complex data into relationship maps) as well as data visualization. Participation in the capacity exchange helped CDRI reflect on current good practices and potential for improvement with respect to LIBROS, motivated the team to practice and apply systems thinking in our future projects, and made the team more mindful about generating actionable study recommendations. We also updated our current research project monitoring and evaluation plan to be more inclusive and to reflect the extent to which we have achieved our priorities for growth that we had set.
Engagement in these capacity exchange activities generated two main learnings. First, an initial understanding of the nature and characteristics of the study as well as the context of the study country are fundamental. Those initial understandings will provide insights into the decision of whether to maintain or adjust any new proposed methods or concepts to better implement the research project. Furthermore, it will help both SHARE and the local research team to assess whether additional training is needed before implementing the research activities or whether they can provide training to other SHARE partners. Second, there should be substantial time dedicated to the understanding, reflecting, and adjusting phase to better match capacity strengthening activities to the needs of the study and country. In future rounds of research, SHARE should implement capacity exchange assessments and activities earlier to allow partners to benefit more.

Authors

• Phoury Bun, Cambodia Development Resource Institute

• Sopheak Song, Cambodia Development Resource Institute