30 – Principles Conclusions: The Principles and Capacity Building

[00:00:06] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Principle. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m an anthropologist and Social Impact Scientist, and I’m here today with David Stern, co founding director of IDEMS. 

Hi, David. 

[00:00:19] David: Hi, Lucie. We’re doing a conclusion sort of thing on principles today, is that right? 

[00:00:23] Lucie: Exactly. So we’re going to explore whether our principles, well, how our principles tie in to one of our activities in IDEMS. A lot of my work is to do with capacity building in West Africa. So we have colleagues in West Africa and I really want to explore how our principles are holding up. 

[00:00:46] David: No, I look forward to this. Of course, capacity building is one of our principles, so that’s well aligned already.

[00:00:52] Lucie: Good, okay, that’s fine, we can stop now, we’ve got the conclusion. Should we, I mean capacity building is within a bigger group of principles about Scalable Impact. 

[00:01:03] David: Ah, that’s a nice one, yeah. This is one of the reasons that we care about capacity building, that we see this as a way of actually scaling the impact we have, that we don’t just want to do capacity building for the individuals but for what they’re able to contribute to others.

[00:01:18] Lucie: Right, okay. So just to explain a bit in terms of what we do with our colleagues, so we have colleagues that we’re trying to develop their skills both in the very practical sort of support that they are able to give to partners, which is what our work is about, it’s about supporting partners in their research. But we’re also looking at how they can do that not only as individuals but through other structures. 

[00:01:43] David: What you’re actually pointing at is we’re encouraging them to sort of seize local innovation and create opportunities for themselves within their environment. We’re sort of trying to support that as part of our capacity building. We don’t just want them to do, and this is I think a big differentiating factor of how we work maybe a little bit compared to some of our other good groups who we know, who work and do bits of capacity building where it’s then just about the individuals. 

Whereas we are trying to encourage and build the skills of the people whose capacity we’re building to be able to then build structures and to be able to do more than just think about themselves, that’s the Local Innovation. 

[00:02:22] Lucie: It is. But I wanted to come back to Scalable Impact because it’s about replicating the solutions. 

[00:02:29] David: What do you mean replicating? 

[00:02:30] Lucie: I’m just reading what it says. 

[00:02:33] David: Okay, sorry. 

[00:02:35] Lucie: ‘Towards understanding how those solutions can be replicated.’ At the moment I have three colleagues in West Africa. The idea is not to just stop there, the idea is to have an internship programme, and the capacity building is separated into, I think, three sort of, I want to say levels, because of sort of experience, levels of experience, where we have interns, then we are able to hire apprentices who then ideally graduate, let’s say, to become junior fellows. 

[00:03:02] David: And I think what’s important to say is that that sort of categorisation is one which has emerged, has evolved, we’re continually evolving, of course. But it’s something which has evolved from us assessing what we were doing and actually recognising that as we went from one to three and now we’re recruiting some more, we needed to be able to differentiate the sort of level of people are at in terms of the support they were getting and how we were encouraging them in different ways.

And so this idea that we’ve got, we’ve evolved towards these sorts of three levels of an internship, which we use to get basic skills to people, and that’s sort of very much about getting experience, exposure, skills, in a short period to quite a lot of people. So in our latest internship program, we took on eight interns, which is the most we’ve ever had in some sense in this way in West Africa. And we’re trying to then give them exposure and experience. And our hope is that we will, from those eight, recruit one, maybe two. 

[00:04:08] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:04:11] David: You’re already thinking that, I know, into a sort of apprenticeship role, where they will have longer to actually try to sort of get the tools of the trade, so to speak. Then the hope is from that apprenticeship role, they might go off and do their own things, as some of the interns would have gone off to do their own things, or they might go into a fellowship role. 

And the idea of the fellowship role is that this would really enable them to take the skills they’ve learned and to think about how they’re going to now, sort of, turn this into a career pathway for them, what is it that they’re doing next, and so on. And that’s the sort of timeline, the whole thing being four years or so for this whole timeline, is roughly what we found is needed. Kind of, you know, having enough time is important. 

[00:04:58] Lucie: This comes down to the principle of Sustainable Development, in order for anybody, in order for anybody to develop enough skills to be sort of independent and confident in their role, they need time to develop, and not only develop in those skills, but also find the way, find the path that they want to develop in.

[00:05:18] David: Yes, and it’s this element of we are not trying to force people onto a particular path. We’re trying to enable people to find their path. 

[00:05:27] Lucie: Which ties in with Options by Context, perhaps. 

[00:05:31] David: Absolutely, yes! Oh, we’re getting the hang of this now! 

[00:05:36] Lucie: Just remind people, it’s very much thinking that there isn’t one size fits all, it’s about what works best for, well in this context, we’re talking about Options by Context is what works best for one person or one colleague in their particular context at this particular time. So it’s with working with them and supporting them to find what option is best for their context. 

[00:06:00] David: And recognising that of each of these levels, we’re not trying to get everybody to carry on with us or do this, we’re trying to find people for whom that option is aligned with what they’re wanting and it suits them and it’s their context, it matches their context and so on. And more than that, we’re trying to then enable them to, in their context, innovate to find the things that work for them. I do want to get to Viral Scaling on this because it’s the fun bit. 

[00:06:24] Lucie: Okay, well, that one I’m not really sure then. 

[00:06:26] David: Well, think about Kenya. So in Kenya, we’re a little bit further along. We don’t run the internship program. So a few years down the line with our West African team, we don’t want to be running the internship program. This should be run by local partners who have gone through and who have built an organisation which is the one that now runs such an internship program, we hand that over. 

We hand that process over and we then get a whole team. So in Kenya, there’s now a team of 20 people, most of whom have gone through some form of internship or apprenticeship or fellowship, where it wasn’t defined as such. But retroactively looking at that is what’s helped us to form what we’re doing in West Africa.

And the Viral Scaling comes because they’re now the ones offering that. 

[00:07:09] Lucie: So you can see a bit as a pyramid scheme, is it called? 

[00:07:12] David: I love to think of it as a pyramid scheme, but it’s sort of maybe not the best way of doing the analogy. 

[00:07:18] Lucie: It has a diagram. It makes sense for me.

[00:07:21] David: Exactly, exactly. But it’s this element of actually enabling others to take the idea and actually evolve it, develop it for themselves. And a lot of this is only really possible because the tools that we’re building are Open by Default. 

[00:07:36] Lucie: Okay, yeah.

[00:07:37] David: And therefore our partners can take the tools that we’ve developed to run these different things and use them and adapt them for themselves and make them work in their contexts, and so on. So, all of this is sort of really quite central to the ideas that I have in mind in terms of capacity building over time. There is an element of really being patient on this, but it does come down to this, the long term vision is not for IDEMS. 

[00:08:05] Lucie: Exactly. This comes down to the principle of Systems Thinking, I think. 

[00:08:08] David: No, I always think Collaborative by Nature before we get even to Systems Thinking, because this is about, you know, we’re not just trying to build for ourselves, we’re trying to build these opportunities, we’re Enabling Opportunities for others to create structures and to build things which enable them to be able to do what they need to do in their environment to create a living, to be able to create opportunity themselves. 

And so I would argue that it’s really this collaborative nature that we’re not trying to hold on to these things, we’re trying to create things which are open by default and then enable them to get out into the world through viral scaling. That’s really central. The Systems Thinking does come in, of course.

So I think part of the Systems Thinking related to this is just this fact that we recognise that in a lot of the areas we work, the need for our skills is just immense. But we could never scale to offer the services at the scale they’re needed. For one, we’re too expensive. 

[00:09:07] Lucie: We’re too far away as well. 

[00:09:09] David: Too far away, there’s all sorts of other reasons. So being able to think about how we can support others in this collaborative approach, to be able to do that, we will always have interesting opportunities that emerge. In fact, the more people that use our sort of approaches, of course, the more opportunities we will get in other ways. 

[00:09:30] Lucie: And that’s also how we Embrace Diversity. 

[00:09:33] David: Well, good one to bring in. Yes, I guess it is, in some sense. But I’d argue in this context, it’s potentially the diversity of different groups who we might support. So in West Africa, we’ve recently had discussions where we do have, you know, somebody in Niger, somebody in Burkina, and they’re both at the stage where they’re starting to think, okay, over the next few years, maybe I’d want to sort of build a structure, which I could sort of then take these ideas and run with. But the way they’re doing that is very different. 

And so we’re embracing the diversity of different ideas. Again, this relates to our Options by Context, but it’s sort of a different approach to it, in some ways. And I would argue that part of the Embracing Diversity for us is also this element that within the work that we have, we are getting the work in so many different areas.

If we could hand over some of those areas to others, from the diversity of the work, we still have a lot of other things to do, we’re not going to be short of things to do. So because we have this great diversity, we can afford to be collaborative. It’s not just that we can afford to be, we kind of need to be. Because otherwise we couldn’t deliver on the things that we’re doing. 

And so these, they all really do come in. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them sort of do come into the simple ideas. One of the things I don’t think we’ve touched on enough, as related to this Open by Default, that a lot of what we’re creating are training resource materials, which they could then take up and use and expand, and actually build their own businesses out of.

This open approach to these educational resources, to these training approaches, mean that even our capacity building is something where this can be taken up by others because of the Open by Default nature of the resources we’ve created. 

[00:11:32] Lucie: And so the capacity building there that we’re doing is not only on developing their skills in understanding and being able to support others, it’s also developing their skills in using those materials in order to be able to train others as well. 

[00:11:46] David: That’s all necessary, I believe, to the sort of Viral Scaling approach. These do really tie in very well.

[00:11:53] Lucie: We haven’t discussed at all the set about Informed Decision Making. 

[00:11:57] David: That’s a really interesting one. Remember that’s the set which was added afterwards, and so it’s not always at the forefront of my mind. But part of this, and I would argue it’s one of the sets that we don’t necessarily do as well as we should, so we should maybe be doing more about this. So let’s look at the Evidence Based piece of that. 

[00:12:15] Lucie: Exactly. To me, it’s starting with Evidence Based. And so we’ve already mentioned that there’s a huge need, the reason why we’re doing it is because there’s a huge need that we can’t meet ourselves. 

[00:12:26] David: But that’s evidence of what? The point is evidence based is really about the academic rigour. So, if we’re trying to bring academic rigour in, well, we need to be publishing more. And we are doing little bits where we’re trying to understand how do we get our internship approach, how do we start publishing about this, how do we communicate this as research?

[00:12:48] Lucie: And this ties in also then with the, well, Consciously Ethical. So I mean, I would argue that we are, we try to be Consciously Ethical. But we also need, in order for publications, then we also need to be explicitly ethical as well. 

[00:13:03] David: Well, I would argue that we maybe are not doing enough on the Consciously Ethical because we’re not doing enough to actually do the evidence piece on this. Now, of course, part of the problem is, and it’s a term which is not necessarily totally well known, but we’re bootstrapping it. We’re not actually funded, generally, to do this. We’re doing this as a means to achieving the support we’re giving. But that means that we don’t have funding to have somebody actually studying how we’re doing it, we’re trying to do that on the side. 

We don’t have the core funding to be able to actually develop and write up and produce this evidence. If we did, it would be really expensive. I mean, really doing this evidence well ourselves is a really expensive process. And I would argue in many cases, the evidence base we do best is one which is collaborative, because it’s very expensive to do good research. 

[00:14:06] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:14:06] David: Universities, academic partners, research institutes, they’re sort of set up to do research. Really what we need to do, and we should be making efforts to do this, is build out some elements of the studies we’re trying to do and actually build the evidence base up in collaboration with researchers in different institutions.

So there’s some really interesting opportunities for that. But this is something where I would argue in the capacity building work we’re doing at the moment, this is underdeveloped. I’ve tried for years, I’ve encouraged people to do publications. I remember even last year, we sort of discussed, should we be publishing on the internship approach?

And, you know, this is something which we continually encourage and we try to build in, but it’s not central. And so therefore, I would argue we are underdeveloped in the evidence based part of this capacity building. And even in how we develop the research. 

[00:15:06] Lucie: Exactly, so we’re exploring it ourselves as a method for capacity building.

[00:15:12] David: What do you mean? Actually trying to sort of build the research part in to the work that’s happening with the interns so that they’re doing that, which is part of them gaining the capacity as well. 

[00:15:24] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:15:25] David: And what’s of course interesting about that is now if you think about that, well actually Developing Research is really about understanding that new research methodologies can make use of different sorts of data. What sort of data could we be talking about here? 

Well actually, let’s say our partners build their structures in different ways and now are the ones doing the internships themselves within their structures. Maybe we could get data structures, which is set up to be actually doing a different type of research, which wouldn’t be possible otherwise, but because they’re all part of our research approaches and they’re sort of connected in these ways and thinking about this continual learning and this idea of being Critically Assessed.

That we are still doing. We are critically assessing ourselves and we are encouraging others to critically assess us and to bring that feedback in. 

[00:16:14] Lucie: And that’s both internally within, for example, the capacity development side of things, but it’s also with our peers, and externally.

[00:16:20] David: And externally, exactly. And so, you know, I would argue that on the Critically Assessed component, we are making the effort a bit more. And it’s not always through academic critical assessment, but that’s okay, because that’s not necessarily what’s most important to us at the moment. 

[00:16:40] Lucie: And so you mentioned also just before coming to Critically Assessed, you mentioned the principle of Developing Research. So there are possibilities or future avenues for potentially, how we do do research on the capacity building aspects of our work.

[00:16:56] David: But not just on the capacity building aspects of our work, also on the Viral Scaling component. And this is one of the things which I would argue is totally interlinked with these ideas of Developing Research, that the research methods at the moment are not generally set up around processes like Viral Scaling, which is a very interesting process to study.

If we’re able to get elements of Viral Scaling in there, what are the research opportunities with data coming back from that which is maybe routinely collected data? And that would be rather interesting and different and different from actually standard academic research processes. But I think could really show how you can build structures which scale and which sort of impact differently from the ground up.

So those would be the sort of elements where Developing Research is not just about doing research for development, it is about also understanding how a lot of the processes, a lot of the exciting parts of development, we don’t have good research methods to really learn from them, exploiting the data, which is becoming available, widely available.

The opportunities that are coming in from new data sources are so far not being taken up in research as much as they could, and I see opportunities for that. 

[00:18:14] Lucie: So what about Informed Decision Making then? Do we do Informed Decision Making? 

[00:18:20] David: Let’s come to that principle explicitly. It’s all about sort of bringing in diverse forms of information to be able to make, and maybe even measuring their uncertainty, as part of a decision making process. And I would argue that at the moment, we are weak on that. We might be bringing in diverse forms of information, but we’re really not studying the uncertainty elements around it and sort of how certain we are about the information that’s coming in.

[00:18:50] Lucie: What sort of information are you thinking of there? 

[00:18:52] David: Well, so if we think about our capacity building approach, we have an approach which has evolved, but which is very much evolved out of the constraints of the opportunity we have within it. 

[00:19:07] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:19:08] David: Should we be, instead of maybe doing the approach we’re doing at the moment, which I think I’m very happy with, and I think we’ve reached the conclusions of how to go through this approach through the experiences we’ve got and through observation and other experiences which we’ve grown from. 

But do we actually know, can we measure the uncertainty around what we think will happen? So at the moment, for example, we’ve gone from rather a large number of interns, you know, even I think the first time in Burkina, it was four interns, in Niger, it was six. These are still relatively small numbers, especially given 107 or more applied in Mali. So it’s still relatively small numbers. 

But, we’ve gone from that down to one or two people who have then gone through into this apprenticeship approach. Now, we’ve identified those people with processes, which I think have been inclusive and I think they have also Embraced Diversity. So I think we’ve done that quite well. 

[00:20:12] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:20:13] David: We’ve consciously, within that, been taken on people where we felt it’s about Enabling Opportunities. And this happened both in the Niger recruitment where there was somebody who was maybe less qualified, but seemed to be a good match if they could actually rise to the challenge, and they did.

And similarly in Mali, there was again, somebody who was sort of almost rejected because they were less qualified than their peers and they didn’t have experience. But we actually recognise that they didn’t have experience, but they did have potential. And so actually having that diverse set of people and having a few people within where we’re explicitly enabling opportunities to emerge, somebody who doesn’t have experience, and that’s why we’re not taking them, maybe isn’t the only reason. If they have good potential, we sort of took that on.

But we still, in our next step, generally, to go down to the apprentice, we’ve always decided to really take on a very small number of people for that longer period of time to make them inherently part of the team. And that’s worked really well, because the people we’ve chosen, have stuck with us and they’ve grown and they’ve really developed. But, you know, maybe we should be taking different approaches to this.

You know, we don’t actually know that that’s the right way to do it, we don’t have any evidence that this sort of approach of going with internships, apprenticeships, and so on, is better than, let’s say, recruiting straight into apprenticeships and actually maybe recruiting a few more apprenticeships, not doing the internship part, reusing those funds.

Now, admittedly, the funds for the internship are relatively low compared to the funds to run the apprenticeship. We feel it’s a very cost effective model, which is what we have the budget for. But we don’t know that this is the best way of actually doing this, we don’t have any evidence, we don’t even know, and this is the key point. We don’t even know, we haven’t measured the uncertainty of what we do and don’t know.

And I think that’s the point, that our decision making on this has included diverse forms of information, but I certainly don’t feel we’ve done the work that would be needed to actually understand, well, how confident are we in the decision making here? 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not beating myself up about this. I think we’ve done as well as we can within our constraints, and I’m happy with what we’ve done and how we’ve decided it and what we’re doing. This is no problem to me. This is why these are guiding principles rather than hard and fast rules. 

But the Informed Decision Making principle does make me think, if we have the time and resources going forward, I’d like to do more on the Evidence Based. I’d like to be able to make better decisions in the future about this. Is this approach genuinely better than other approaches we could be following that exist and that are out there? 

[00:22:59] Lucie: Well, it’d be interesting to see. So one of our, cross-cutting partners, is taking another approach to capacity building, doing some similar work to us but in a different specific subject area. So interesting to compare notes between both of our teams. 

[00:23:16] David: I mean, one of the things very explicitly is we’re doing all of this, we say we are Collaborative by Nature. But we’re doing all of this outside of any academic structures within the region.

[00:23:27] Lucie: Yeah. 

[00:23:28] David: What if we were to integrate into a degree program, or a master’s, so this was to relate to actually people’s master’s thesis, which we are doing with other bits of capacity building? And so, you know, there are other places where we are integrating this into formal education, where there was this particular case, we’re not.

Is that the right approach or is that the wrong approach? I would argue with the current needs we have and the current situation we’re in, we have no choice. This is the only approach we could do at this point in time. But that’s not Informed Decision Making, this is constrained decision making.

 I would love to investigate if we actually could, I see the advantages of doing this independently from formal education, but I also see the advantages of maybe integrating this in with formal educational structures. But I don’t have the answers around that.

[00:24:20] Lucie: Well, it’d be interesting to come back to this in a year’s time or something to have another review of how we’re doing on capacity building. 

[00:24:29] David: Absolutely. It’s been surprisingly easy to go through. And actually, you’ve been pretty systematic taking me through all the principles we’ve got. 

[00:24:35] Lucie: Sorry. 

[00:24:36] David: Which is good. There are some which, you know, you haven’t mentioned, Transdisciplinary or Holistic Interventions. Barring those two, we’ve covered a lot of principles on this one topic. 

[00:24:46] Lucie: But the transdisciplinary, I mean, I can easily answer that in terms of who we hire, who we choose as interns. They come from a range of disciplines, so it’s multidisciplinary, but the topics we get them to work on are transdisciplinary, because we ignore what discipline they came from.

[00:25:05] David: Absolutely, and we put everybody out of their comfort zone. We’re pushing people to go beyond their disciplinary boundaries. We’re sort of recruiting from this wide range of disciplines. 

[00:25:15] Lucie: And this is part of our work though in general, it’s what the projects we’re supporting are asking us to do as well. 

[00:25:21] David: Exactly, this is part of the nature of the work. Now the question is whether the people we’re taking are actually experts yet. No, I’d argue that they’re not. When they come in as interns, they’re not yet experts, but we are getting them exposed to and involved in transdisciplinary work, which is where we come in as experts. But the way we’re working is transdisciplinary, which is what they’re exposed to and then involved in, which is really exciting. I love that. 

And I guess the key point about the Holistic Interventions here is that if you think about how we’ve discussed this internship programme, if that’s the core of this capacity building, it’s maybe not the internship programme, but that’s the whole point, it’s the fact that we’ve actually thought about many different angles of the people coming in and what they’re going to do and how they’re involved. And that’s why there’s these multiple phases that we’re thinking sort of about that capacity building. 

As far as we can, we’re thinking of it as holistically as possible to be able to take these different angles. So we have covered all of them. That’s okay, you can leave with your conscience clear. We’ve actually mentioned, I believe, every single one of our 20 principles within this conversation. 

[00:26:33] Lucie: I think what’s also quite interesting about how we’ve had this discussion, to me, it’s demonstrated how principles can be used to reflect on progress, I guess, within a project or within an activity.

[00:26:45] David: And looking at some of the principles where we feel we’re weak, like Evidence Based. I would argue the capacity building is a real point where I would love to build our evidence base about how we go about this. I feel that our evidence isn’t rigorous, you know, we don’t have that academic rigour involved in defining these processes.

How would I love the opportunity to actually deepen that, and actually get in academic partners who would be part of actually helping us to study this. Now of course, there’s financial constraints, which are why we are where we are. But that is something where, you know, I’m putting this to you potentially, what about looking for academic funding, looking for research funding to study some of this, and actually then writing this up?

I can think of a couple of funders who may be interested. I don’t know exactly if I have the right academic partners who would want to take this up as a research study, but that’s something which we could investigate and look at.

[00:27:44] Lucie: Great. Well, thank you very much, David, for taking the time to go through that with me. 

[00:27:49] David: Well, thank you for sort of bringing this up as a topic.