CARE Failing Forward

Push Aside the Panic: Thinking Bigger than Just a Health Response to COVID 19

Alfred Makavore, a key responder in CARE's Ebola response in Sierra Leone in 2014-2015, share's lessons about how to improve our COVID-19 response. "At first, we thought it was just a clinical problem, and we treated it like that." Alfred encourages teams to think beyond a clinical response, to understand what communities are facing, and to build trust. "We have to push aside the panic." Engaging governments, setting up local coordination, and trusting field teams to make decisions are some of his key recommendations.

 

Expect to Fail: Advocacy, Partnership, and Women Workers' Rights

Daniel Almeida from CARE's Latin America Regional office warns, "Don't lose sight of the real reason you are doing this work." He's talking about how to do advocacy more effectively in partnership with social movements. Do your political economy analysis, have clear communication with partners, invest for the long term, and expect to fail. He tells teams, "not to expect to have results that are 100% things that they showed in the design." Learn more about this work from the recent paper: CARE International Advocacy and Influencing.

Planning a Better COVID-19 Response: How Mistakes from the Ebola Crisis Can Help

Learn to act with imperfect information. Take calculated risks. Remember who is most at risk. Those are just some of the calls to action from Andres Gomez de la Torre, drawing on CARE's learning from Ebola response. Originally recorded in August of 2018, this podcast has critical lessons that CARE is using today in planning our COVID 19 response, and are an important call to action as we know some of the world's poorest countries are about to get hit with a crisis for which they are not prepared.

It will never happen in 6 months: Lessons from building financial apps in Uganda

Melch Natukunda from CARE Uganda talks about trying to build the first ever financial services app that linked poor rural women to banks. What's the biggest lesson? "it’s not just financial services. Anything we do should be trying to lighten women’s burden and help her with the other challenges she’s dealing with.” It's also about remembering that, "at a bank, someone is looking at this project and saying, 'is this giving me profit?' That will never happen in 6 months." You need at least 5 years to build something that will really work, but once you've got it, it can work for millions of people.

Just Live It: How to learn from failure in the conservation sector

Iain Dickson from Birdlife talks about his project, "Embracing Failures" which is developing a failure taxonomy that helps conservation organizations learn about the underlying causes of failure. What can we do to get better at learning from failure? "Just live it," says Iain. "We think about it as a complex overarching problem, but many of the solutions are simple." One of the key solutions they found was that there's appetite to talk about failure, but it works best when this is a conversation, and not an exercise filling out forms.

From Supervision to Empowerment: New Ways to Partner for Sustainability

Episode Francophone:Sandra Georges de CARE Cameroon discute le projet CHAMPS, et la transition de supervision a l'autonomisation. Ils changeaient leur approche de "faire faire" a "faire avec" a "laissez faire". L'approche comprenne la transition graduelle, un changement d'avis sur le partenariat, et la confiance aux communautes.

French Episode: Sandra Georges from CARE Cameroon talks about the CHAMPS project, and how they have had to move from "make others do" to "do together" to "let others do." It involves changing the way we think about partnership, gradually handing over responsibility, and believing local teams and communities about what approaches work best.

Walking the Tightrope: Balancing Participation and Independence in Evaluations

Kylie Hutchinson, independent evaluator and author of three books about evaluation and program planning: Evaluation Failures: 22 Tales of Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned, A Short Primer on Innovative Evaluation Reporting, and Survive and Thrive: Three Steps to Securing Your Program’s Sustainability talks about how to learn from common evaluation failures to improve impact and social justice. Her two tips are learning how to engage stakeholders more effectively and understand context when you're doing an evaluation. Here are three questions to ask yourself before launching an evaluation: 1) What are we trying to learn? 2) What are we going to do about the answers? 3) When do we need to know?

If you want to learn more, you can read a free chapter in the book here, or find some tips on how to find evaluators here: http://evaluationforleaders.org

 

Understand Your Entry Points: How Admitting Failure Transforms Policy

Peter Lochery from CARE and Matt Freeman from Emory University discuss how research showed our programs weren't sustainable, and how admitting that failure helped drive innovation and national policy transformation in Kenya. They talk about 13 years of research partnership in the SWASH+ project--and how influencing policy has to be based on a willingness to admit what's not working, and an understanding of entry points and how the system works.

Answering Practical Questions Instead of Academic Ones: How to design research that makes more sustainable programming

Learning to be less dogmatic about answering the most important academic questions, but instead focus on the practical questions that would allow project teams to "innovate and push" around creating sustainable programs for WASH in schools. Matt Freeman from Emory University and Peter Lochery from CARE talk about what they learned trying to create research that moved programs forward, and allowed us to get better at the work--even when it wouldn't contribute to publications in prestigious journals. They talk about 13 years of research partnership in the SWASH+ project--and how lots of smaller, practical studies with rigorous methods were more useful than one big RCT.

Scale and Replication: How the MENA Region is Using Failure to Create Programs that Last

"Fear of failure is the only thing that ensures your dreams won't come true." Hiba Tibi from CARE's Middle East and North Africa hub talks about what they're learning from programs that didn't work, and how they are using those lessons to improve sustainability and scale. A big lesson is that Women's Economic Empowerment programs have to focus on both gender equality AND solid business cases--but many programs only manage one or the other. You can check out more lessons in the recent paper: Bringing Gender Equality Closer to Women's Economic Empowerment.

9 Things You're Probably Doing Wrong: Lessons from Global Cash Programming

Holly Radice--CARE's Global Cash and Voucher Assistance Advisor--talks about the most common mistakes she sees when people implement cash programming. Some of her tips? Pay attention to GBV, focus on women and engage men, and most of all--don't be afraid of cash! There are lots of resources that can help you get it right.

Square Pegs and Round Holes: Fitting research to community needs

Anne Sprinkel and Dipendra Sharma from CARE's Tipping Point project talk about the challenges in implementing RCTs, and the risk of sacrificing communities' needs to the methodological rigor that researchers demand. "Make sure you have a good reason for doing an RCT," says Sprinkel. Sharma adds, "Start with good programming, then build research around it." They also have some great tips for managing expectations, clear communication, and just how long it takes to do it right (Hint: it's a lot longer than you think).

Hurry Up and Wait: How Working With Young People in VSLA Changes the Pace of Programming

Zegeye Bante from CARE Ethiopia talks about working with youth VSLA, and what changes that requires from our traditional models. Youth are visionary and impatient, and want to meet their goals fast, so we have to accelerate our programming. At the same time, making sure that young people really understand the model, and that their parents and teachers accept and support the work we are doing takes a lot longer than it does with adult groups. So we have to find ways to build in more time at the beginning, and then get faster results so youth keep coming back.

Exciting Times: Creating Urban Savings Groups With No Experience

Grace Majara and Takara Morgan talk about starting savings groups in Uganda's cities in 2008, with no experience, and no one on the team who had ever done it before. We assumed that the city VSLAs would be exactly the same as rural ones, and we were wrong. Differences in financial literacy, poor access to services, and the need to bring in people who understood the context are all key lessons from Grace's decade of experience in the space.

Mobility, Instability, and Crisis: Creating Savings Groups in Emergencies

Camille Davis and Barack Kinanga talk about the challenges of creating savings groups (VSLAs) in emergency settings. Barack works in Yemen, where they have been able to create savings groups, but only by making a lot of adjustments to our traditional model. Not every context works for VSLAs, and it takes longer for people in crisis to build up savings than in development settings. We also have to think about what happens if the people have to move again, and what they need to build resilience.