Bootcamp Reflections: When you think you are ready to scale, think again…
HEA Stage 1 finalists, Codi, share their key learnings and reflections from the HEA’s Phase II Virtual bootcamp
Like most of us, Codi has needed to significantly adapt over the last 18 months in order to survive, remain relevant and ahead of the curve. As a Lebanese NGO, we have found ourselves facing extremely challenging environmental factors over the last few months especially, reflective of the economic and political turbulence in Lebanon, compounded by the aftermath of the Beirut August 4th 2020 explosion and COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
Since 2017, we have been in the business of changing lives in Lebanon (focused on marginalised youth) by providing them with a top quality, free, technical and digital education. Today, three years after our inception in our first location in Beirut, we offer 2 main programmes, our 6-month Core Full-Stack Web Development and our 2-month Computer Literacy. We have a strong community of 78 Codi alumni, of which 81% are employed across 8 different countries. In February 2021 we launched our Core in a second location in Tripoli, North of Lebanon, in partnership and fully-funded by USAID. Throughout this time, Codi has gained recognition as a specialised digital and leadership center dedicated to train and equip youth with the relevant knowledge and tools to enter the workforce in the Digital / Tech sectors in Lebanon and beyond.
Now seemed a particularly fitting time to get selected to join Stage One of the Humanitarian Education Accelerator (HEA), as we were busy launching Codi in Tripoli along with strategizing how to deploy our efforts to scale sustainably. Headed into the HEA Stage One Virtual Scaling Bootcamp with excitement to learn and open minds, we realised throughout the extensive content delivered that there were several elements of our processes which we needed to refine (or define in some cases) for us to implement and drive the scale we were after. Led by enriching dialogues with other selected peers and HEA mentors, we used this invaluable opportunity to dedicate time to think through and co-create the necessary strategies in order to deliver on our recently crystalised scale goal: train 350 Full-Stack Web Developers per year by the end of 2024.
We wanted to share 3 key reflections we have taken away from the bootcamp to perhaps help other organisations out there on their scaling journey, irrespective of area of impact or organisation structure. We hope it helps anyone out there looking to get serious about scaling:
CODIFICATION — this in fact has become our new and favourite term from the bootcamp. Codification is defined as “the action or process of arranging laws or rules according to a system or plan”. Having been introduced to the concept of Codification, it was clear we were aligned as a team on what needed to be done to scale, however replication plans highlighted we were lacking clear documentation outlining our processes and operational frameworks. From this, we are creating a Codi “Wikipedia” in Notion (free team product for NGOs) which documents all our internal processes and from which we have now identified within each of our programmes, which components are “core” (set-in-stone), “modular” (flexible) or “hackable” (fully adaptable) for future partners.
MONITORING & EVALUATION (M&E) — M&E consistently comes up in almost every conversation within the NGO / impact ecosystem. As a not-for-profit, we naturally place a strong emphasis on assessing the impact of each of our programmes and ensuring we are able to demonstrate that impact, both through quantitative and qualitative outcomes and metrics.
During the M&E bootcamp day, the team reflected on our current ways of measuring and reporting on impact and identified 2 main gaps in our M&E processes and capabilities:
1) Internally — we were not involving enough team members in the M&E process and as a result we were missing out on the opportunity to evaluate our impact across many areas which we were already monitoring;
2) Externally — we were missing the endorsement of many of our key external stakeholders (i.e. prospective students, employers, life-skills partners) around validating our impact and ensuring a constant feedback loop in order to sustain our relevance.
Based on the above, and having already worked on our stakeholder mapping at an earlier day of the HEA bootcamp, we were now in a good position to put ourselves in the shoes of those same stakeholders and think through which data gathering frameworks had to be put in place in order to drive that evidence building, while ensuring strong relevance to all parties involved. From this we were then able to go back through our long list of gathered data points and structure a desired outcome framework to include a more structured set up to measure more effectively going forward.
PUBLIC SECTOR ENGAGEMENT — finally, the HEA bootcamp strongly reinforced the importance for Education organisations who are ready and willing to scale, to allocate efforts to building strong and long-lasting relationships with local Government and public sector groups. For Codi, it was more specifically focussed on creating relationships within the Ministries of Education and Social Affairs of Lebanon, schools and technical institutes. Part coding bootcamp, part leadership course, our free programmes continue to provide a strong complementary solution to address current widening education gaps for both refugee and host communities in Lebanon. It has been close to impossible in the last 18 months to exchange with the Government due to high levels of political instability as well as an incredibly high turnover of officers across Ministries and public functions. There is little evidence that suggests drastic change in Government in the next few months and so we must once again allocate efforts towards this engagement and try to show these stakeholders the evidence of our impact since 2017 (short-term), in order to work towards getting our Core programme accredited by MEHE (long-term) while ensuring strategic future alignment with the Government and creating value within the broader (formal) public sector education ecosystem.
As we are now working hard to put our plan into action (and therefore getting ready to be hopefully selected for the next stage of the HEA programme), we wanted to make sure we also took the time to share our key learnings about what it means to scale (and hopefully help others along the way).
Overall we were absolutely thrilled to have been one of the organisations to be selected for the HEA bootcamp and we believe it has had a tremendous impact on our speed and readiness for scale. No matter what the universe has in store for Lebanon next, we are heading into the coming months empowered and enabled by the expertise of the HEA team and mentors and Codi is now ready to be serious about getting big.
