Learning by Doing…What You're Already Doing - The CLA Workshop

Collaborating Learning and Adapting (CLA) is the backbone of USAID/Uganda’s organizational culture; it’s embedded in the Mission’s DNA. In Uganda, CLA is operationalized through the Uganda Learning Activity(ULA), an innovative Monitoring Evaluation Learning (MEL) mechanism implemented by The QED Group, LLC.

ULA seeks to scale up and institutionalize a CLA culture within IPs through planning and implementing CLA pieces of training, stakeholder meetings, learning reviews and events, facilitating communities of practice, theory of change (TOC) workshops, and dissemination of evaluation findings. The components of the CLA approach are critical to addressing IPs' challenges and provide the opportunity to unpack and ground truth their daily activities through a CLA lens. To address the challenges cited by IPs, ULA began collaboratively designing the workshop curriculum and quickly realized that ULA needed to adapt its approach to move beyond defining CLA to also focus on the application of CLA.

ULA sought to unpack how an organization would know when CLA is being practiced and whether it’s being done well through experiential learning, called “learning by doing.” ULA revised and implemented the customized workshop curriculum to build IPs’ CLA capacities, informed by the CLA framework, in order to ground-truth IPs existing and future opportunities to intentionally work with key stakeholders, taking the time to learn from implementation and making the necessary adjustments to improve activity results CLA.