Measuring the Contribution of CLA to Organizational & Development Outcomes: What have we learned?

In 2016, USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL), together with the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education, and Environment’s localworks program,  launched a Learning Network focused on building the evidence base for Collaborating, Learning and Adapting, or CLA.

USAID funded five partner organizations to examine the question: does a systematic, intentional and resourced approach to CLA contribute to improved organizational effectiveness and development outcomes? And if so, how and under what conditions?  Each partner used their $100,000 grant to design and implement a study in response to these questions over 20 months, ending in April 2018.

This document describes lessons learned and the key findings from Counterpart International.  Counterpart’s study was designed to measure the application of knowledge in the Participatory Responsive Governance – Principal Activity (PRG-PA), a USAID-funded activity implemented by Counterpart International. PRG-PA works in four regions in Niger with a goal to improve collective responsiveness (government and non-government) to priority public needs in order to increase citizen confidence in the state. As part of this study, Counterpart measured how facilitators of the staff and community-government dialogues used learning from CLA activities and how those activities affected meeting participation quality. Specifically, Counterpart analyzed if a facilitator’s increased use of knowledge from CLA activities results in greater feelings of empowerment and engagement from participants in the government-community dialogues.