The Global Delivery Initiative and the Importance of the How
As international development professionals, we tackle multi-sectoral projects in complex and dynamic environments across a myriad of development organizations. Regardless of the technical sector, country, or funding agency, we all face common implementation problems and look for approaches, tools, and best practices to address our challenges and achieve better development outcomes. We also hope to learn from other practitioners working in a similar space and adapt accordingly given our own circumstances and complexities. How do we access this collective body of implementation knowledge and share our own lessons learned?
In January, I attended a Global Delivery Initiative (GDI) workshop, “Learning, Iterating, and Adapting to Achieve Change,” sponsored by the World Bank, GIZ, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. This conference expanded upon a World Bank introduction to the GDI at the March 2015 conference, “The Role of Knowledge Management in Capacity Building in Latin America and the Caribbean”--please see my 2015 blog post for additional details.
The GDI, as defined by the World Bank, “ is a collaboration across the international development community to forge a new frontier in development efforts worldwide: improving the outcomes by leveraging the delivery know-how.” Essentially, it is the how in project implementation which correlates to USAID’s Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) approach and other organizations’ knowledge management and learning strategies. We are all critically looking at how we are doing our work, sharing our knowledge and best practices, and iterating and adapting--and we can learn from one another, regardless of the terminology.
While GDI started as a World Bank initiative, it ultimately will be a partnership across international development organizations that includes case studies addressing implementation challenges, knowledge-sharing events and platforms, and capacity building. USAID, through its Global Development Lab and the LEARN contract out of the Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, will pursue opportunities to collaborate in this partnership. On the LEARN front, we hope to share the CLA case studies from our 2015 case competition and our soon-to-be-launched 2016 competition. We also will host and co-facilitate a closed working group on Learning Lab that will explore questions and follow-up activities from the January conference.
Please click here for more information on the GDI and the forthcoming Global Delivery Initiative Case Study Library. We look forward to sharing more information as it becomes available and hearing your questions and suggestions!