How to make ICT4D partnerships better deliver real development impacts

The ICT4D Collective hosted a workshop at the WSIS Forum in Geneva today on the key factors colleagues considered to be necessary to overcome four of the most important problems in delivering effective ICT4D partnerships.  The idea for the workshop stemmed from the systematic review of the impact of ICT4D partnerships completed by Marije Geldof, David Grimshaw, Dorothea Kleine and myself for DFID earlier this year.  This highlighted four main areas where further thought was required:

• How can we best ensure that local communities and interests are involved in partnership implementation?
• How to ensure that intended development outcomes are really addressed?
• How to build sustainability and scalability into ICT4D partnerships from the very beginning?
• What mechanisms can be used to ensure trust, honesty, openness, mutual understanding and respect?

Following an opening presentation by David Grimshaw (Practical Action, and Royal Holloway, University of London), we divided up into four groups (chaired by Paola Uimonen from SPIDER, Peter Drury from Cisco, and Dorothea Kleine and myself from Royal Holloway, University of London), each discussing one of these themes, and the outcome was the following mind map (click on image for larger version) that reflected the collected views of the 30 or so people present, as well as those who joined by WebEx video conferencing services kindly provided by Cisco.

A more detailed .pdf file of the mind-map is available here: WSIS Forum 2011

Thanks to everyone who participated, and helped to make the discussions so interesting.

The development impact of ICT4D partnerships: join our discussion online at the WSIS Forum

Cisco is generously sponsoring the opportunity for anyone to participate in the session on the Development Impact of Multi-stakeholder Partnerships in ICT4D ( http://groups.itu.int/wsis-forum2011/Agenda.aspx?event=event_60) that the ICT4D Collective is convening from 16.30-18.00 Geneva time (15.30-17.00 UK time) on Tuesday 17th May at the WSIS Forum ( http://groups.itu.int/default.aspx?tabid=856).  Please share this information as widely as possible, so that colleagues across the world can join in our discussions and deliberations.

To join the online discussion, please use the following information (best to try to log-on about ten minutes in advance to download the applet and check the systems are working) :

Meeting Number: 608 639 429
Meeting Password: 123

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2. Enter the meeting password: 123
3. Click “Join Now”.
4. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen.

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Policy Brief on the Development Impact of ICT4D Partnerships

The Policy Brief resulting from the systematic review report by Marije Geldof, David Grimshaw, Dorothea Kleine and Tim Unwin on the development impact of ICT4D partnerships is now avalable from the R4D website (Policy Brief) and the ICT4D Collective website (Policy Brief).

This emphasises five key findings:

1. Success is increased when detailed attention is paid to the local context and the involvement of the local community in partnership implementation.
2. It is important for such partnerships to have clear and agreed intended development out-comes, even where constituent partners may themselves have different reasons for being involved in the partnership.
3. Sustainability and scalability of the intended development intervention need to be built into partnership design at the very beginning.
4. Successful partnerships are built on trust, honesty, openness, mutual understanding and respect.
5. A supportive wider ICT environment needs to be in place, both in terms of policy and infrastructure, if such partnerships are to flourish and deliver effective development outcomes

Link to Full Systematic Review Report on ICT4D Partnerships (.pdf)

Important new report on the impact of ICT4D partnerships on development

Together with Marije Geldof, David Grimshaw and Dorothea Kleine from the ICT4D Collective, I have just completed a DFID funded systematic review on the development impact of ICT4D partnerships. This is part of the extensive programme of systematic reviews initiated recently by DFID, that draws very largely on the model of such reviews used in the medical sciences.  DFID thus emphasises that ‘Systematic reviews have been used in health, education and social policy to meet this need. Systematic reviews are a well-established and rigorous method to map the evidence base in an unbiased way as possible, assess the quality of the evidence and synthesize it. Systematic reviews can then be mediated in specific ways to make it easier for policy makers and practitioners to rapidly understand the body of evidence and use this as a strong foundation on which to base policy and practice decisions’.  Undertaking the review was both challenging and interesting, and we not only reached substantive conclusions about the role of ICT4D partnerships, but we also made considerable comments about the difficulties in undertaking rigorously defined systematic reviews on topics such as this.

Based on our review of 53 key publications in the field, we had five main substantive conclusions:

• Success of ICT4D partnerships is increased when detailed attention is paid to the local context and the involvement of the local community in partnership implementation
• It is important for such partnerships to have clear and agreed intended development outcomes, even where constituent partners may themselves have different reasons for being involved in the partnership
• Sustainability and scalability of the intended development intervention need to be built into partnership design at the very beginning
• Successful partnerships are built on trust, honesty, openness, mutual understanding and respect
• A supportive wider ICT environment needs to be in place, both in terms of policy and infrastructure, if such partnerships are to flourish and deliver effective development outcomes

In terms of our recommendations relating to the actual systematic review methodology, we suggest that

• When dealing with multidisciplinary issues such as this, it is crucial to retain some flexibility in search strategies, and procedures such as those often adopted in reviews of health interventions may sacrifice real understanding in the name of overly zealous adherence to claimed rigour
• External reviewers play a crucial role in guaranteeing the quality of such reviews, and they need to be rewarded for their contributions
• Many of the publications that we reviewed lacked a rigorous account of their research methodology, and we recommend that all funders of development related research should insist that researchers carefully document their methods in all of their publications, so that readers can judge the reliability of the findings
• Many publications on ICT4D partnerships do not specify either what they mean by partnerships or the real development outcomes that they were pursuing.  It is therefore very difficult to identify the precise impact of partnerships on development.  It may well be that interventions that claim to have benefited from partnerships could have been delivered more effectively through other contractual arrangements

Copy of report (.pdf)

Policy brief (.pdf)

New guide to good practices in UK-Africa Higher Education partnerships

The Association of Commonwealth Universities’ Africa Unit has just published an excellent short guide on good practices in developing educational partnerships between higher education institutions in Africa and the UK.

As the Africa Unit comments, “The main reason behind the preparation of this Guide … is the lack of knowledge about the scope, nature and depth of partnerships in this area. The Guide does not set out to present a set of universal, objective rules to be followed and which will guarantee success. Instead, it identifies 10 valuable ‘principles of management and good governance’ which have been the driver behind a number of successful and sustainable UK-Africa partnerships, which can inform future partnerships”.

This is a really useful document, full of helpful tips and advice, and anyone considering developing such partnerships should get hold of a copy and read it diligently. The ten key principles that it advocates are:

1. Shared Ownership
2. Trust and Transparency
3. Mutual Understanding of different Cultural and Working Environments
4. Clear Division of Roles and Responsibilities
5. Effective and Regular Communication
6. Joint Strategic Planning and Implementation
7. Strong Commitment across the board from Staff and Management
8. Supportive Institutional Infrastructure
9. Monitoring and Evaluation
10. Sustainability

As someone who has been actively involved in such partnerships over the last decade, these principles resonate very strongly with my own experiences.  Many thanks to the Africa Unit for expressing them so clearly and succinctly.