Learning to learn: The experience of learning facilitation for grantees of Comic-Relief-funded projects

African Evaluation Journal

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Learning to learn: The experience of learning facilitation for grantees of Comic-Relief-funded projects
 
Creator Lomofsky, Dena Grout-Smith, Jake
 
Subject Crimonology; Sociology; Capacity Building; Development Management; Evaluation Monitoring; Evaluation; Learning; Results-based management; Adaptive management; Grant-making
Description This article shares a learning facilitation process that Comic Relief, a UK-based funder, supported with its grantees. It is based on the case study of a learning cohort that Comic Relief established for one of its grants. The methodology for the case study is participatory action research. The case study demonstrates that by actively encouraging learning, grantees are empowered to adapt essential programmes to enhance programme effectiveness. Grant-makers need to consciously create the conditions for learning to encourage programme adaptation because organisations in international development (or local charities) have operated for many years under the dominant paradigm of results-based management. Results-based management tends to assert upward accountability based on low levels of trust and mechanistic processes for planning and reporting that attempt to control outcomes through forward planning and high-level decision-making. In this paradigm, organisations often end up proving a vision of success, rather than honestly learning from their implementation experience. However, a greater recognition of its unsuitability for working in highly complex contexts necessitates more learning by frontline workers and implementing organisations. This article shares our experience of how a carefully designed learning coordination and facilitation process encourages this kind of adaptation amongst grantees, generating lessons about design and implementation of projects that can be shared more broadly with others working with gang-affected girls and young women.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor Comic Relief, Southern Hemisphere, Dena Lomofsky, Jake Grout-Smith, Orla Cronin, Anya Stern, Elena Mancebo, Bill Sterlan, Alice Sampson, Wilma Wessels-Ziervogel
Date 2020-10-28
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Action learning
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/aej.v8i1.480
 
Source African Evaluation Journal; Vol 8, No 1 (2020); 10 pages 2306-5133 2310-4988
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/480/907 https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/480/906 https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/480/908 https://aejonline.org/index.php/aej/article/view/480/905
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2020 Dena Lomofsky, Jake Grout-Smith https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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