Promoting CLA among the USAID/Pakistan Implementing Partners (IPs) – IPs M&E Community of Practice

USAID/Pakistan has the agency’s second-largest program portfolio, with more than 80 complex mechanisms whose combined value is almost $2 billion. We have discovered that implementing partners share many common performance management problems and take varied efforts to solve them. A lack of knowledge sharing among the partners leads to duplicated efforts and wastes mission resources.

CLA Approach

• Knowledge Management: After identifying that knowledge sharing was a problem, our USAID/Pakistan performance management team formed a learning platform, convening implementing partners’ monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff every quarter to share experiences and new ideas.
• Mission Resources: Because the mission’s central contract, the Performance Management Support Contract, has a learning and capacity building component, we asked the implementing partner to help establish and manage the platform, later named the Implementing Partners M&E Community of Practice.
• Relationships & Networks: Our goal is to build the capacity of our partners to a level where they no longer need mission support and can continue filling the knowledge gap and adapting best practices from each other.

Lessons Learned

• Owning the community of practice is the key to our partners’ success. Our goal is to make the community of practice self-sustaining so that it can work with minimal or no support from USAID/Pakistan.

Outcomes

• So far, four quarterly community of practice meetings have been held. About 90 implementing partner representatives and USAID/Pakistan staff members attended the first meeting in Islamabad and about 30 attended in Karachi. Most were meeting each other for the first time.
• Our implementing partners now see each other as resources, sharing data and knowledge to learn what works, what doesn't, and how they can adapt successful ideas. This sharing also occurs online through a working group on USAID Learning Lab.