Partnering to Help Partnership Builders: A Peer Assist for Private Sector Engagement

The Global Partnerships team in the U.S. Global Development Lab has organized the Private Sector Engagement Forum (PSEF) every other year since 2009. Overall, it has been a highly successful event, earning consistently strong marks on participant evaluations. But the main piece of feedback we got from the 2013 event was a desire to explore more complex topics at a more sophisticated level.

Why We Chose to Do a Peer Assist

So our conference planning team went back to the drawing board. We recognized that most USAID staff members coming to internal learning events want to talk about their successes. After all, it is a rare opportunity to present their work to a group of peers and highlight their Mission/Bureau/Independent Office. Of course, we wanted to provide plenty of opportunity for participants to learn from their peers’ good work.

However, our team also understands the challenges of engaging the private sector to partner with USAID for better development impact. While there are official guidelines like the Global Development Alliance Annual Program Statement, useful tools like the online course for partners, and recommended best practices like those outlined in a new report about making multi-stakeholder alliances work, sometimes what is really needed is a different perspective.

Organizing the Peer Assist

For this year’s event, forum attendees had to submit an application in which they demonstrated that they were facing a challenge that they hoped to get input on from their colleagues.

Prior to the event, consultants at Dexis Consulting Group and myself, read the over 70-plus submitted applications and systematically identified common challenges that participants hoped to workshop at the forum. We wanted to be sure there was enough interest from the group as a whole to have a conversation on a specific topic.

We then identified twelve individuals (or in a couple cases, pairs of individuals) who had well-articulated challenges to explore around one of these unique themes of broad-based appeal. Finally, we reached out to these individuals to participate in a peer assist workshop in which forum participants would self-select a challenge to join and provide input on.According to the Learning Lab, peer assists are:

Face-to-face or virtual gatherings that bring colleagues together to share knowledge, best practices, or lessons learned on a particular topic. They can be an extremely useful learning activity to facilitate knowledge sharing, participatory learning, and collective problem solving.

I admit, I was nervous. This was unlike anything we had done before, and I was not sure how people would react to being asked to speak in front of their peers not because of a success, but because of a challenge. Yet, my nervousness was misplaced. Everyone we contacted said they would be happy to participate.

Next, we reached out to an additional twelve colleagues and asked them to help facilitate the session. We provided both our “challenge presenters” and “challenge facilitators” with a written outline of how the session would be structured as well as an over-the-phone coaching session in advance of the forum, requested a 3-4 sentence description from the challenge presenters to help participants select their sessions, and made sure the challenge presenters and challenge facilitators connected directly before the main event.

Outcomes of the Peer Assist

The day of the event came and the workshops took place—and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The challenge presenters felt they got useful insights from the participants in their session and the participants valued being included a peer assist because they got to learn about a project or program they weren’t familiar with while providing their technical expertise. As one participant said in the evaluation, “I felt the other participants and I were able to really help the challenge presenter look at [the challenge] from different angles. I think we all learned more from the exercise.” This kind of feedback reinforced for us as forum organizers that we met participants’ needs and provided them a valuable learning experience.

Challenges of the Peer Assist

This isn’t to say there weren’t challenges. A couple challenge presenters noted that, if they had the chance to do things over, they would have provided a more specific challenge. Getting valuable input on a broad topic was harder they felt, than a more specific and tangible challenge.

Time Well Spent

Yet, one anticipated challenge—that a peer assist approach would take significantly more work on our part as the forum’s organizers—never surfaced. The same approach we used to organize our workshopping session—application review, session design, advance meetings with session leads, and event execution—was used by my colleagues to design their more traditional plenary and panel sessions. Good peer assists, it appears, take the same amount of pre- and post-work as good panels.