Facilitating a strategy development process in Kenya
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Over the past few months, a few of my colleagues at SEI and I have been engaged in a project to support our partners at Hand in Hand Eastern Africa to develop a strategy for their work on waste management and circular economy issues. Hand in Hand Eastern Africa is part of the global network Hand in Hand, which supports people at the bottom of the pyramid to build business that lift them out of poverty and build better livelihoods. They run a wide range of programs and in recent years, they envision waste management and circular economy as a crucial area where they can contribute simultaneously to improving people’s economic prospects, as well as environmental sustainability.
So throughout this week, I have been in Nairobi to meet with the Hand in Hand Eastern Africa team and to conduct a strategy development workshop, together with my colleagues from the SEI Africa office in Nairobi - Alphayo Lutta, Anderson Kehbila, Cynthia Sitati and Pauline Macharia.
The workshop had two main aims. One was to share and discuss some of the findings from our initial scoping study which kicked off the strategy development process. The other aim was to, together, deliberate about what the key problem the strategy aims to achieve, the root causes of the problem and the outcomes and impact that the Hand in Hand team seeks to eventually achieve as a result of implementing the strategy. This is because we would like the strategy to respond to the actual problems on the ground and their root causes, rather than make assumptions that are not valid.
The workshop had a sizeable number of participants, about 20 altogether from the Hand in Hand team, in addition to four of us from SEI. And in what turned out to demonstrate a high level of executive support for the process, we had the Hand in Hand Eastern Africa CEO with us for the whole first day and part of the second day while the chairperson of their Board joined us for the whole second day.
We designed the workshop to use problem-driven and back-casting approaches, adapting techniques from the USAID theory of change development process and the Harvard PDIA toolkit. Our colleague Carla Liera has been facilitating us to use these techniques in several of our ongoing projects and initiatives at SEI. While some aspects of our workshop design were content-heavy and we needed to modify and simply some aspects mid-way through the workshop process, the participants altogether found the process quite valuable. A lot of the discussions focused on making explicit and challenging the assumptions we make about the problems we are trying to solve and our beliefs about the likelihood of particular interventions to bring about the desired outcomes. It was interesting to witness the debates within various group exercises, with some participants wondering if certain assumptions in other program areas should also be revisited in light inf the insights from the current discussions. The back-casting approach was also pointed out as a useful approach for getting down to the details about what the desired future change actually is in real terms, whether qualitative or quantitative. We also had quite some interesting discussions about different types of possible desirable impacts that can result from interventions, based on the six models for understanding impact by Liz Ruedy.
After a tiresome two days, our team now looks forward to engaging in the tough but stimulating process of consolidating and synthesizing outputs from the workshop into the draft strategy document that will then be discussed with Hand in Hand prior to iterations and generating a final draft. We also look forward to engaging in other collaborations with Hand in Hand, building on the work we have done together thus far.
The rest of the week was spent in meetings with my colleagues at the SEI Africa office, as well as engagements with partners and colleagues in the sanitation and waste management sector in Kenya where I shared about our ongoing work on the Resource Recovery Toolbox. This also provided good opportunities to gather feedback and input into the development of the toolbox.
Some photos from the workshop are shown below.
Photos: All by Pauline Gitiri Macharia/SEI except the last one which is by Daniel Ddiba/SEI
More about the previous work we have done with Hand in Hand: