Beads - Passion for Facilitation

Capacity development, learning, change, poverty/power/progress

Blog about learning/change, facilitation, systems: small groups and large scale processes, and poverty/power/progress.

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All Blog Posts (83)

M&E and learning in logframed programs

I usually find myself working in "logframed" programs, and have become adept at making useful monitoring and learning happen within that context. Here are some of the things I have learned as a non-M&E person:

  • it doesn't have to be in the logframe - if there is a good result, governments and development partners will rarely ask "where does…
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Added by Lucia Nass on March 27, 2015 at 17:46 — No Comments

Power - a reminder from Dublin

At the end of a content packed workshop on Governance, Accountability & Citizen Empowerment in Dublin (June 2014), I knew what I wanted to do with partners in the Ethiopia Social Accountability Program (…

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Added by Lucia Nass on August 24, 2014 at 15:00 — No Comments

Gender Analysis and Influencing Budgets - at the heart of Social Accountability

When we were updating the Gender Responsive Budget tool (GRB) for ESAP2 partners it struck me again how fundamental the combination of gender analysis and influencing budgets is for an inclusive and…

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Added by Lucia Nass on July 31, 2014 at 14:00 — No Comments

Citizen Engagement for improved basic services in Ethiopia

This paper was prepared for the Governance, Accountability & Citizens' Empowerment workshop in Dublin together with Tamiru Lega Berhe (ESAP2) and Tamrat Getahun Woldemichael (…

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Added by Lucia Nass on June 9, 2014 at 12:30 — No Comments

Capacity develops in interactions and relationships

A Social Accountability practitioner was arguing the other day that citizens needed their own space to reflect on service issues, and should be protected from political and government interference during that process. In his view, citizens need to be empowered first. While I certainly agree that citizens need their own spaces, I strongly disagree that citizens can be…

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Added by Lucia Nass on May 2, 2014 at 13:30 — No Comments

Social Accountability in Ethiopia – learning by doing

Tomorrow, we are hosting a meeting with over 100 Executive Directors of NGOs in Ethiopia. The NGOs are grantees and their sub-partners of the Ethiopia Social Accountability Programme 2 (World Bank multi donor trust fund of about 25 million USD). The Executive Directors’ Day (EDD) will discuss Social Accountability now and in…

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Added by Lucia Nass on March 30, 2014 at 12:30 — No Comments

Large group event – capturing what happens

How do you take the essence of what happens in a group of close to 200 people? This question becomes even more difficult to answer when the audience is predominantly geared to an oral rather than a writing culture. Here’s what we did:

  1. Find out who likes to write: In an icebreaker, we asked the audience to stand up if a statement related to them. One of the statements was: you have a masters’ degree. This enabled us to identify people who likely know how to…
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Added by Lucia Nass on February 23, 2014 at 18:25 — No Comments

Learning by comparing

How do you organise learning from projects among 50 civil society organisations and their government counterparts? The method we used was learning benchmarks. We gathered data about the projects from quarterly reports, and presented this in the form of tables and graphs. In this way, projects of 5 organisations were compared on progress, social inclusion, gender mainstreaming and satisfaction with behaviour change of citizens and government stakeholders in the project.…

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Added by Lucia Nass on February 23, 2014 at 17:39 — No Comments

Reality Training - getting the 10% of learning right

“I have got the best experience in my career in the last 5 days.” This is an example of the great comments we received from participants in a training for new grantees of the Ethiopia Social Accountabiltiy Programme phase 2 (also on…

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Added by Lucia Nass on November 1, 2013 at 12:10 — 2 Comments

Capacity Development is 90% more than training

What's interesting about starting a new long term is assignment is that you get a chance to prove yourself all over again. When I prepared for my latest new assignment, I discovered that the organisation seemed to equate Capacity Development with training. How could I let my new colleagues begin to think about the fact that Capacity Development is much more than training...

A while ago I stumbled upon a clip developed by Charles Jennings. It's called the 70:20:10 approach to…

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Added by Lucia Nass on July 9, 2013 at 18:02 — No Comments

How rural communities in Albania get the capacity builders they need

In 2009, the Albania Local Capacity Development Foundation (ALCDF) pioneered a ground breaking concept. Rural communities were not getting the capacity building services they needed to advance in tourism, forestry, agriculture, and local government. Lindita Manga (photo), Executive Director of ALCDF, explains how it all…

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Added by Lucia Nass on June 12, 2013 at 14:30 — No Comments

Promoting Social Enterprise: Scaling Is Not About Money

I have been hired by SNV Ethiopia to backstop the development of a Local Capacity Development Facility (LCDF) in the WASH sector. I used to backstop the development of LCDF’s in the Asia region, and was curious to find out about lessons from SNV’s pioneer LCDF in Vietnam, known as the SPARK movement. SPARK aims to…

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Added by Lucia Nass on May 31, 2013 at 15:22 — No Comments

How to introduce Social Network Analysis

I am a self-made woman when it comes to Social Network Analysis: just picked it up along the way and learned from doing. Joitske Hulsebosch (twitter @Joitske) however recently finished a short SNA course with Patti Anklam (twitter @panklam). Joitske…

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Added by Lucia Nass on May 24, 2013 at 12:33 — 4 Comments

Informal networks 2: learning from the unplanned

My friend Naa-Aku Acquaye-Baddoo told me about an exercise she did a while ago to help teams in SNV Asia think about role clarity and teamwork. Participants literally "walk" the relationships they have with others around a specific issue or topic, and carry a colored threat to visualise their walk. What emerges on the floor…

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Added by Lucia Nass on January 18, 2013 at 5:03 — No Comments

Civil Society Strengthening - "Leading from behind" in Myanmar

I have been home for a few days now, but I am still in awe of civil society in Myanmar.

When I lived there until five years ago, I was involved with an INGO that worked with small grants and mentoring for community based organizations. Other INGOs were inspired by the work that proved possible ‘under the radar’ at grassroots level. I witnessed the development of a…

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Added by Lucia Nass on December 10, 2012 at 14:00 — No Comments

Gender equality in Vietnam

For international women's day, I wrote a blog about women in Vietnam.  "Vietnamese women deserve to be treated special at least one day of the year, as the men seem to do very very little in the home. Listening to newly wedded Vietnamese women, that is not really changing yet either. And I'm speaking to middle class women, who speak English. One would expect change to…

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Added by Lucia Nass on November 4, 2012 at 10:30 — No Comments

Project Management cartoons

Nev Ward, a project manager in the UK was sharing some suggestions on linked-in for a manual I am developing on project management. He referred to  the five stages of a project (Geoff Reiss, “Project Management Demystified”, Third Edition, p204). It had me laughing out loud:

 

1. initial enthusiasm

2. onset of reality

3.…

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Added by Lucia Nass on September 14, 2012 at 10:00 — No Comments

Games in International Development: Fad or Innovation?

People have been playing more games these days in Washington D.C. And I don’t mean the strategies of the Obama and Romney spin teams.

Two recent events suggest games’ growing popularity in D.C. aid circles: this one I attended at the World Wildlife Fund earlier this month and this Tuesday’s upcoming …

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Added by Jennifer Lentfer on August 26, 2012 at 18:56 — No Comments

Informal networks: circles of influence tool

With Aung San Suu Kyi Voted into parliament, everybody wants to be in Myanmar at the moment, so I feel especially fortunate that my old friends from Metta invited me to come back and work with them at this important juncture in history.

I had a very interesting few days in far away Naugn Kham, about…

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Added by Lucia Nass on August 10, 2012 at 7:45 — No Comments

Want me to listen? Tell me a story.

If you've ever had any doubts that international aid or global health is a business, then one visit to an International AIDS Conference will clear them away. Between the free frozen yogurt from big pharma and bookend speeches from the Clintons, it was hard to ignore what a "sexy" disease HIV was last week in Washington D.C.

At a pre-conference meeting, I made a…

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Added by Jennifer Lentfer on August 1, 2012 at 15:48 — No Comments

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