The Power of Stories to Develop Monitoring and Assessment Toolkit for USAID's Private Sector Engagement Process

Abstract Information: Through its Private Sector Engagement (PSE) Policy, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has taken a strategic approach to consult, strategize, align, collaborate, and implement with the private sector to achieve greater scale, sustainability, and effectiveness of development or humanitarian outcomes. Despite an existing body of evidence on PSE practices and outcomes, critical gaps remain in understanding how to most effectively partner with the private sector to achieve and sustain results. This presentation will discuss how we used stories to develop tools to monitor and assess partnership processes, manage partner’s experiences, and improve overall partnership performance. This research was commissioned by USAID’s Private Sector Engagement Hub and carried out by Purdue University. Using a qualitative methodology, we explored 8 different partnerships between USAID and private sector organizations across 5 sectors and 5 geographic regions. Some partnerships included NGO partners, local government partners, academic institutions and other donors. Also, some private sector partners were local business owners, while others were national and multinational corporations. We collected 43 partnering stories from individuals involved in these partnerships. These stories were organized and analyzed to develop temporal and event-based narratives for each partnership. These narratives were written using a consistent framework by leading the readers through the start-middle-end of the partnership’s story. Each narrative also highlighted challenges, bottlenecks and best practices throughout the lifecycle of the partnership and included relevant quotes to bring the narrative to life. Based on these stories and narratives, we developed a toolkit for USAID and their partners to assist them to effectively and inclusively design, monitor and assess partnership processes and partnering experiences. This session will first discuss our qualitative, process-based, system analysis methods, used for partnership process evaluation. Second, we will demonstrate the tools developed to regularly and collectively reflect on improving the effectiveness of partnering processes, influencing performance and thus outcomes of the partnership.

Relevance Statement: Our research has contributed a novel approach to monitoring and assessing inter-organizational partnerships especially in the context of USAID’s Private Sector Engagement policy and programming. Our research findings nudge the deep-rooted measurement and evaluation philosophies and practices related to government funded programs that typically focus only on beneficiary outputs and outcomes towards a more holistic approach that incorporates monitoring and assessing programming processes as well, specifically when partnering with organizations across different sectors. For example, when USAID’s Health Bureau partners with a private sector organization to develop programming, most programming evaluation focuses on health specific outcomes. While those are important to measure, we found that those outputs are achievable only if the partnership is performing effectively. However, we found that USAID personnel were not trained and equipped to measure and assess their partnership’s processes and their partnering experience. Our research is significant to AEA 2023, as we captured partnering experiences through participants’ stories and used those to identify when and where in the partnership process were bottlenecks and challenges encountered. Using these points of references we developed both partnership design and assessment tools for future partnerships. Our study demonstrates that engaging with private sector actors in international development with preset approaches to theories of change is limiting, but also detrimental to partnership performance. Thus, it is important to realize that improved development outcomes emanates from increasing the performance of these funders and the effectiveness of their interactions, and that engagement with new private sector actors requires new processes to partner and measure the success of the relationship in achieving desired outcomes. Thus, our proposal intends to showcase both methodological and partnership assessment contributions of our research.