Collaborative Learning

Results for Development builds and facilitates communities of policymakers and practitioners who tackle common challenges by exchanging knowledge and co-developing practical solutions to achieve sustainable progress in health, education and nutrition.

The Challenge

Many low- and middle-income countries are focused on developing strong, self-sustaining systems that support improved outcomes in health, education and nutrition. But systems strengthening is a complex business with a dizzying number of implementation challenges.

The people working to strengthen these systems — government officials, civil society leaders and social innovators — understand the challenges and realities of the local context, but they often lack opportunities to systematically share their experiences or tap into implementation knowledge that their peers in other countries may have. They may have access to global guidance and foundational evidence on what needs to be done, but are less likely to have access to practical “how-to” knowledge that can help them make faster progress toward their goals.

Our Approach

R4D uses an innovative collaborative learning approach that brings people together who face common challenges to systematically share and adapt knowledge and produce new ideas that enable them to successfully tackle practical yet complex issues and achieve their goals.

The collaborative learning approach goes beyond static information-sharing between peers by providing a structured learning process in which practitioners set the agenda and technical priorities, and then co-develop solutions to their common challenges. This approach avoids some of the obstacles created when technical approaches are imposed on country practitioners by the development community, rather than listening, learning and capturing the valuable tacit knowledge of practitioners.

Through in-person workshops and virtual exchanges, practitioners exchange experience on what has worked, what has not worked and why, and work to co-develop practical tools and knowledge products.  This leads to increased ownership and uptake of the knowledge and best practices by those who were part of the process.

We are working closely with our partners around the globe to employ collaborative learning to address challenges, such as:

Fostering Digital Communities
