137 - Documenting Learning Stories: How we’ve tackled harmonizing local and global needs through a learning agenda on a multi-country USAID program

Abstract Information: Act to End Neglected Tropical Diseases | East (Act |East) is a large, global USAID program supporting 12 Ministries of Health in their control and elimination goals for neglected tropical diseases. Act | East developed a learning agenda to guide and systematize investigation and reflection of key barriers to program success. As one of the largest investments in NTD programming in the world, Act | East has the opportunity to generate knowledge to drive elimination forward in the countries in which we support NTD work but also to share lessons and evidence with others in the global NTD community . Since 2018, Act | East has nimbly developed successful strategies to identify key learning questions in each supported country and design learning activities to support disease elimination, while simultaneously leveraging those country specific lessons to identify challenges and innovations across our portfolio. As a program spanning twelve countries, five diseases, and three result areas, operationalizing the learning agenda requires continuous adjustment. Join for a presentation by the Organizational Learning Facilitator on how Act | East leverages the learning agenda as a tool to 1) identify specific and contextual issues important to each country program, 2) organize and analyze learning around themes to connect expertise and drive resourcing across the program and 3) document and prioritize learning stories that are important to share with the global NTD community. This session will provide practical advice from successful learning agenda implementation that has been adapted over four years to maximize the utility of this tool.

Relevance Statement: Current development work requires more than routine M&E – learning agendas are commonly requested as a tool to systematize and resource project needs. For example, the US government recently required learning agendas for all its departments to foster a culture of continuous improvement and support dynamic and adaptive strategic planning. Designing a learning agenda, however, is complicated. Ideally, it incorporates multiple stakeholders and a collaborative development of both learning questions and associated activities. It can be difficult to navigate multiple stakeholder priorities, and the more complicated the program, the more complicated learning agenda design becomes. On global programs such as Act | East, fundamental questions in a specific country might not be important at a global level. It can therefore be difficult to engage with all relevant stakeholders in the project. This session will provide practical advice on how Act | East navigates this tension between locally driven and identified priorities and providing relevant learning to a global audience. The Act | East learning agenda is built at the country level to prioritize local questions and local solutions for NTD programs. However, at the global level, staff develops a set of overarching priorities to guide learning agenda questions and activities each fiscal year. These overarching priorities provide alignment for the thematic analysis of learning outcomes across the portfolio each year. To conduct this analysis experts collaborate across technical, M&E, and communications teams to identify the most important knowledge to share. The project prioritizes blogs, conference submissions, publications, webinars and more to disseminate information within and beyond the project. As evaluators and M&E staff, especially those imbedded within programs, are being asked to design learning agendas.