Collaboration with PSO deepened

Part of the funding will be used to strengthen IICD’s internal organisation to help improve local partners’ capacity to run projects independently from IICD. Having the right competences to manage a project is vital for the continuity of a project after direct support from IICD has stopped. The rest of the funding will be used to support IICD’s transformation into a learning organisation.

PSO and IICD have a long-standing working relationship. This resulted last year in an official partnership whereby PSO allocated funds to IICD to help them improve the participation of women in ICT4D projects in Bolivia, Ecuador and Zambia and to support the establishment of an e-Health Technology Centre for capacity development in Mali. Both projects were funded by the Innovation Fund of PSO, a fund aiming to stimulate Dutch NGOs to work on finding new approaches, methodologies and ways for strengthening capacity development.

Strengthening capacities

New in this partnership agreement is the allocation of funds for the so called Learning working trajectory to strengthen IICD’s capacity to better measure and define the capacity that local partners need in different phases of the project. Though everyone knows that having the right competences and capacity to formulate, implement and manage a project independently is key to the success of a project, it is never made explicit what these competences should be. With the support of PSO IICD is now trying to identify and develop the competencies, capacities and indicators of and for partner organisations in different project phases. IICD will also evaluate its own role and specify tasks in each phase of the project. The monitoring and evaluation system will be elaborated to involve information at the organisation level in each project phase. This needs to result in knowledge on how to improve local partners’ capacity and competencies that will be shared with other (Northern) NGOs together with PSO. Ultimately, this should contribute to the success and sustainability of the projects of its partners in developing countries. For this so called ‘Learn Work trajectory’ IICD will focus first on partner organisations and their projects in the sector Governance in Ecuador and the sector Education in Zambia. Other sectors and countries will follow later on.

Becoming a learning organisation

In addition IICD will proceed with its transformation into a learning organisation. For this IICD received a grant from the PSO Bonus Quality Fund. Within a learning organisation, learning is a leading principle and embedded at all levels. This means that lessons learned are automatically generated from all the work that is done on the ground and automatically followed up by action. For example, if evaluation shows that gender balance is an issue than this should result in an action that ultimately leads to a change at project- and beneficiary-level. Without an attitude to learn from experience opportunities to improve the quality of IICD’s work will be lost. In the past years IICD introduced already several mechanisms to improve the learning within the organisation like the Thematic Learning Circles. These discussion groups bring IICD staff together to share and learn from each other with regard to a specific theme. Together with PSO IICD will look for additional ways to fasten and strengthen the process of transformation.

The activities arising from the Learning working trajectory and Bonus Quality Fund will take place within the existing partnership which lasts until the end of 2010.