What makes a good partnership for scaling innovation?
HEA Finalists, Madrasati Initiative, experimented with many types of partnerships with their work in Jordan. They reflect on what’s made them key enablers of their scaling journey.
Madrasati means ‘my school’ in Arabic and is an initiative launched in 2008 by HM Queen Rania Al Abdullah to provide urgent support to the most underserved public schools around Jordan. Since 2008, Madrasati Initiative has provided infrastructure support to schools and introduced educational programs in more than 840 schools to enhance the quality of education and respond to students’ needs for academic and psychosocial support.
Madrasati’s model is centered on empowering the schools as key community assets, and advocating for improved education policy. Madrasati capacitates schools to introduce quality improvements in ways which are meaningful to their school. Each school implements a program that is co-created and tested by school personnel to respond to students’ learning needs, whether academic or social-emotional. Over the course of two years, teachers and administration build their confidence and know-how, engage the community and observe the change which can be attributed to these programs.
Building this model would not have been possible without the generous support and strong belief of our partners in our cause of quality education. These partnerships have been invaluable to us and have enabled us to continue our efforts to guarantee children in Jordan the right to a safe and quality education. Since 2008, Madrasati has experimented with different modes of partnerships with over 150 public, private and non-governmental entities. Yet this journey has not been without its challenges.
Fostering fruitful partnerships
Drawing on lessons from our 13-year journey in channeling support to public education, we can recall partnerships which have played a pivotal part in our journey to scale. The HEA 2021 Boot Camp gave us an opportunity to reflect on our past experiences in forging successful, and sometimes not-so-successful, partnerships. The Bootcamp helped us identify effective steps for understanding our partners, recognising their needs, their roles in our programs, and within our value chain. We would like to share some of the qualities in our relationships with partners which have been mutually beneficial in helping us achieve important milestones in our scaling journey and helping the partner achieve goals of their own.
a. Creating a shared vision
Make every effort from the onset to create a shared vision. Often shared vision with partners has been implied, but not explicitly worked through, and not always reflected in project planning documents. Without a clear and explicitly described shared vision, relationships can drift apart, or even create competing priorities. We have learned first-hand how developing together the objectives, theories of change, and sustainability plans from the onset of the project is critical for forging partnerships for scaling. Once the “gains” of the partnership are defined and agreed upon, all the partners can commit to the vision and look forward to those shared gains.
Our partnership with UN Women started in 2019 after their call for NGOs to contribute to Jordan’s planning on Women, Peace and Security. Madrasati has a strong conviction in the critical role of the schools in sustainable development. We saw an opportunity for a fruitful partnership and proposed using the Masahati Students’ Clubs programme to contribute. Pro-social values, inclusion and participation are core aims of the Clubs, and this was a golden opportunity for us to develop a school-based model to work on gender-related beliefs in a culturally-sensitive manner. Madrasati and UN Women developed together the specific objectives. The vision of contributing to systems change was deliberately and explicitly laid out in the planning documents, by introducing components at the central level and providing locally-appropriate, tested, gender-responsive content for extra-curricular activities for both girls’ and boys’ schools. Creating this shared vision from the outset facilitated longevity in this successful relationship. At the same time, public schools gained a new supporter who saw their participation as important to a national agenda, and will likely continue supporting quality extra-curricular activities which enhance students’ school experience and learning for the future.
b. Cooperation
Structure projects and create activities to promote cooperative behavior between the partners. Co-creation should be encouraged wherever possible and can be embedded in the ethos of the partnership. Co-creation facilitates cooperation in pursuit for gain and risk reduction, maintains gains for each partner and the mutual benefit resulting from cooperation is in itself a valuable outcome for all partners. Cooperation in pursuit of gains for each partner are maintained, and an additional value is generated as a result of cooperation.
One example here comes from Madrasati’s partnership with the teachers. During the piloting of the Masahati Students’ Clubs program, we learned that a sustainable and impactful program is only possible when it is designed for the nuanced context. Only then were teachers likely to trouble-shoot and test different modes or content to find out one which works in the local environment. In one school in a historical area in the North of Jordan, an enthusiastic teacher who believed in the idea of Masahati could not get support from the rest of the school. Madrasati understood the challenges she was facing and offered this teacher a break from implementation to find solutions around the challenges she was facing. During the following semester, the teacher was able to forge a partnership with a local artists’ collective who were keen on spreading arts within their town. The teacher, with the artists’ collective, were able to implement three different clubs after-school, which resulted in her winning the support of teachers and administration. The cooperative relationship between both Madrasati and this teacher, and also the teacher and the local association, resulted in a win for all three. Madrasati got to record a success on an impactful and sustainable intervention, the teacher became a school champion who helped transform the learning environment, the school had something new to be proud of, and the artists’ collective gained access to an important community asset for fostering appreciation for arts. The three partners built their social capital and, most importantly, children received access to quality enriching activities.
c. Openness and Trust
Like human relationships, openness and mutual trust are prerequisites for a successful partnership for scale. Partners will only be fully invested in a partnership if they are confident that the other has their best interest at heart, of the competence and dependability of the partners, and value the free sharing of information. Fostering openness to learn among the partners, and a trust in the other partners’ knowledge, experience and intentions requires deliberate efforts and a time investment starting from the program design stage.
To kick-off an 18-month partnership between Madrasati, the European Commission and the Ministry of Education in Jordan; we invested in four months of learning, preparation and trust-building to ensure an impactful program at scale with high ownership from all partners. The purpose of the program was to enhance social cohesion in host communities by bringing together the communities of 200 double-shift schools to improve the quality of education. Trust and openness were salient throughout the project and were the key underlying success factors.
In designing the program, Madrasati embarked on a learning journey with the MoE, to understand the policies and processes in place for school improvements and parents’ involvement in school decision-making and identify opportunities for enhancing their involvement. Both Madrasati and the MoE placed a high degree of trust in the schools to lead change at the grassroots level, which meant that both Madrasati and the MoE assumed the role of the facilitator and supporter. Madrasati, with the schools, investigated the drivers and obstacles to parents’ engagement and the schools used this to form active PTAs. Throughout the project, schools and their communities worked on building stronger partnerships, in which openness and trust were present. Schools’ openness to a more proactive role for parents, communities’ trust in the intentions of the schools and an openness to their propositions to start sitting on school improvement committees eventually led to higher accountability and more inclusive school governance structures, and influenced the schools in the long run. Following this experience, the MoE built a stronger belief in the critical role of democratised school governance in quality improvements and reflected this in subsequent plans and strategies. Such results and wins for all involved partners could not have been achieved without the high degree of trust and cooperation between stakeholders at all levels.
Limitations to expect when seeking partnerships for scale
These successes and others were only possible because of failed attempts at partnerships. After all, humanitarian settings are always complex, with many physical, financial, structural and political constraints facing organisations trying to scale humanitarian solutions. Programmes are typically developed as temporary emergency responses and limit the political will to invest in improving those structural conditions which led to the humanitarian need in the first place. As a result, organisations face a scarcity in funding opportunities willing to invest in scalable solutions.
Priorities often shift and compete in humanitarian settings in response to political and emerging developments. Moreover, many projects are short-term and focused on outputs, rather than resourcing relationship-building for the long-term, and unconventional investments in scalable solutions.
In highly regulated settings, the central government could play a critical role in facilitating these partnerships and the synergies for scale. However, without deliberate efforts to channel programs to achieve change at scale, having multiple players often creates competition instead. Recently trends have started to shift, and part of our responsibility is to advocate for donors to adopt long term objectives.
