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Co-Impact Design Workshop February 2023 – Naivasha, Kenya
What do you get when you put together 30 individuals from incredible organizations working on systems change and gender justice, mix with a few superb facilitators and coaches, stir over 4 days with hard questions, conceptual nuggets, intense group work, and time for genuine human connections?
Co-Impact’s Design Workshop! This workshop is the kick-off event to Co-Impact’s design phase, which lasts for 8-12 months, and either precedes or is folded into a multi-year grant tackling complex systemic and institutional change. We were privileged to host 20 new initiatives under our Gender Fund, plus a handful of selected coaches, over two workshops in Naivasha, Kenya, in February 2023.
Why the design phase?
Many organizations rooted in the Global South spend much of their time responding to donor requests and requirements, implementing short-term projects, and raising further resources to keep afloat. This often crowds out what organizations say they need most: time and resources to distill the core of their model and strategic approach. This is critical for all organizations, but especially for those working on complex systems and institutional change.
Co-Impact’s Design Phase strives to dedicate the time, resources, ideas, tools, community, and other support necessary for program partners to engage in this critical strategic thinking, planning, and organizational strengthening work. The result of the design phase is a multi-year strategy developed by the program partner that speaks to their vision and core, and not to the push-and-pull of different funders’ priorities, including those of Co-Impact.
The design phase and design phase workshop in a nutshell:
The workshop is a 4-day “mini tour” of the entire design phase. Five interactive and practical modules take program partners through how to develop a plan for systems change.
First, it begins with unpacking the problem the partner seeks to address, examining how it manifests in people’s lives, and how the design, structure, incentives, and mindsets of the existing system or institution (“the system of today”) result in this problem.
The second module is about envisioning a better future – outlining in realistic, concrete terms what an improved system would look like and how it would perform (“the system of the future”). The critical question is not what the partner can directly deliver to people, but what needs to change in the system for it to perform better for everyone. Respectively, these two steps provide the starting point, or baseline, as well as the destination, or outcomes, of the systems change journey.
The third area of focus is designing a strategy or plan to sustainably shift the system in the ways needed for it to serve all people equitably (“the systems change strategy”). Systems change is never the work of a single organization. The overall strategy therefore cannot rely on the work of only one organization, it must consider a coalition of actors. This coalition is not necessarily a single, formal partnership in which everyone agrees, coordinates, and works on everything together. It is often a pragmatic collection of partnerships (formal or informal), each one focusing on a certain piece of the bigger body of work that is required. The key question is, who is best placed to do what parts of the work to bring about the desired systems change?
In the fourth module, the program partner articulates their own role within the strategy. That is, what of the work that is required are they best placed to do, how they will do this work, and in what ways they need to strengthen their organization in order to best succeed at it.
Finally, the fifth and final module (“learning, measurement and evaluation”) is for the program partner to develop a “map” for this journey. This includes clear and measurable definitions of the outcomes (for people, the system, and a stronger organization) as well as the starting point (baseline), milestones to understand progress, measurement approaches to track progress and guide learning and adaptation along the way, and a clear plan to test critical questions, assumptions, and hypotheses that form the foundation of the strategy and vision for change.
Who delivers the Design Workshop?
Designed and delivered by the Co-Impact team, and supported by a new cohort of systems change coaches.
As part of our broader effort to build Global South capacity for systems change, to broaden and diversify where the knowledge (and what it takes) to shift systems sit, we trained a group of 17 coaches who are deeply rooted in the countries where our program partners work, in Co-Impact’s approach to systems change and scale. A number of these coaches participated in the design workshop alongside our program partners in Naivasha. During the design phase, the coaches will collaborate with the Co-Impact team and where needed (and requested by program partners), will support with systems change plans. Building such coaching capacity is a first step towards our goal of supporting our program partners with proximal and relevant expertise, and building the field for systems change. We will continue to experiment with ways of providing this support, and hope the coaches will also use their systems change knowledge and outlook for the benefit of not only our program partners but also others.
What did we learn?
There were many highlights during the workshops, but three areas emerged as the most consistently significant “aha moments” for our program partners.
More than three-quarters of workshop participants singled out working on a systems-change analysis and approach through concrete, hands-on exercises centered around their own initiatives as the primary positive take-away. Within that, the idea of working at the scale of the problem resonated with many participants.
“We thought we were working at systems scale, but we actually were not. We did not see ourselves as a part of the system and that there were other moving parts as well. After working for 20 years, we work with 2000 villages in Indonesia today – but how do we reach the 76,000 villages in Indonesia? This week has really changed my perspective on systems change and scale.”
Program partner from Indonesia
“The biggest shift for us this week has been the realization that we have looked at the problem and our work from an initiative point of view. We haven’t considered the problem from a systems perspective and haven’t considered all the other actors that are a part of the system; some of whom can become partners in our work on the ground.”
Program partner from India
Many program partners found very useful the systematic analysis of how gender and intersectionality manifest in the systems they seek to change. So for example, rather than thinking how to tackle big root causes such as patriarchy or racism “head on”, the questions became around how patriarchy shows up concretely in how systems function, and how it influences the way key actors in the system behave.
“We know gender pretty well and we do good work on gender. But we have not really thought about intersectionality in the way that was discussed yesterday. We haven’t considered how identity, beyond gender, changes the way that the problem might show up for our constituents. We need to go back and understand that better.”
Program partner from South Africa
“It was eye opening for us that the gender and intersectionality focus was also explained as an internal lens for organizations to develop.”
Program partner from Mexico
Program partners found the concrete articulation of outcomes across three levels very helpful – for the people whose lives they wish to improve, for the systems which they seek to change so that they function better, and for themselves, to become an even stronger system-level actor. Together with this, partners very much appreciated the emphasis that any measurement and evaluation activities they will conduct need to first and foremost be useful to them, for their own learning and adaptation.
“After this workshop, we realize that we have large goals and ambitions, but we have spread ourselves too thin. This is because our impact at the different levels, does not align to the larger vision we want to see in our country in the next 20 years. Doing the exercise of thinking about people level outcomes and system level outcomes was useful, because it helped us tie the impact together.”
Program partner from Nigeria
“The LME session was actually your secret sauce. Despite being so short, it helped demystify what funders mean by learning and measurement, and provided an interesting perspective on how we can weave these concepts through our entire work.”
Program partner from Sri Lanka
Each time we hold these workshops, Co-Impact also continues to learn about how to continue to improve their design to best support our Program Partners. In this iteration, two topics came up consistently:
1. Partners shared a concern of how to take their entire team back home along a similar systems change journey. We invited several participants from each organization, but it is true that taking best advantage of the design phase requires the engagement of the entire organization because it asks fundamental questions about the core, the focus, and the main strategy for change going forward. For many organizations, this could become an exercise in “change management” – which sounds daunting. We agree, and we are committed to support this cohort through this period, as well as thinking ahead how to better prepare the next cohort.
“While we understand that we will need to implement change and strengthen our organizations, we are not sure on the how of these aspects. How do we make our entire organization go through this exercise?”
Program partner from Kenya
“In one of the last sessions, you spoke about organizational strengthening and change management. But, we did not go into detail. I wish there was more discussion around this. Change management is such a loaded word, it can mean anything, and it’s important to not think of it just as hiring consultants and some HR improvements. Some guidance on the mindset shifts and leadership through this period would have been very useful.”
Program partner from India
2. Partners really engaged with the importance of building and managing a winning coalition, strategizing who they could get on board, given that changing systems cannot be done by any individual organization. That said, many acknowledged they had not necessarily done so before, and were eager for more concrete examples and support on how to go about this.
“Would it be possible to have mentors from organizations that have done this design phase before? We would love to learn about how they managed partnerships and coalitions and took everyone along on this systems change journey.”
Program partner from Brazil
What next?
A month after the workshops, program partners are well on their way into the design phase. Over the next 8 months, our partners will conduct political economy analyses, review legal and policy frameworks, strengthen partnerships with key government stakeholders and other allies, test critical assumptions, hold community dialogues and focus group discussions, undertake organizational capacity assessments, hold workshops with potential coalition members and much more! Each partner has devised a plan for what they want to accomplish during this phase to set themselves up with a strong, plausible systems change strategy they believe in.
As for Co-Impact, we will host virtual refresher sessions with the program partners, and our regional teams will support each partner as needed. The most important thing is that program partners feel they are in the driver’s seat, that this process is managed by them and is for their benefit. We are incredibly excited and honored to walk this journey with our program partners and can’t wait for all the learnings and what comes next!
