Find and Cultivate the Right Government Champions
In large, complex institutions with broad mandates, such as government, ideas can easily be lost without a champion — an individual with influence and commitment — to elevate them and move them through the system.
Interviewees emphasized the importance of identifying and cultivating these champions — but also warned of the fragility of individual relationships given high levels of turnover.
Advice from the field on finding and cultivating the right champions
1. Connect through existing, embedded partners.
When new to a country or region, identify existing organizations — NGOs, donor governments (such as USAID), or private sector partners — in that location that can help explain the context, regulatory environment, government priorities, and key decision-makers and make connections. When Partners In Health entered Liberia during the 2014 Ebola crisis, it had not worked previously in the country. So PIH looked to its long-standing partnership with Last Mile Health to engender trust with the government. PIH worked closely with LMH’s Liberia team to understand the country context, allowing the organization to quickly mobilize and respond to the crisis.
2. Ensure personal relationships become institutionalized.
Many times the relationship between the social enterprise and the government is initially a personal one, e.g., between a founder and a particular minister. In order to sustain staffing and regime changes, however, it is important that these relationships become institutionalized by engaging other government representatives, negotiating letters of intent, or signing MOUs or contracts.
“In our experience, we have found that our partners feel enormous risk in sticking out their necks. Often, one voice can be enough to halt a new idea. So, we have found that we need to ensure buy-in of individual stakeholders before a larger group convenes to make decisions, to make sure everyone is positioned to be open to a change from the standard practices they’ve been following.” — Survey Respondent
3. Decrease the (physical) distance between potential champions and solutions.
Make it easy for potential champions to see, hear, and experience solutions by bringing them into close proximity with the work. When trying to engage the interest of senior state officials for its education program, Pratham conducted its demo close to the state capital so the officials would see what was happening “right under their noses.” Last Mile Health co-locates its county-level offices with the county government health teams to ensure constant communication and flow of ideas. Fundación Capital takes senior officials to visit projects in other countries and meet with policymaker peers, which helps to ensure buy-in to the work.
4. Cultivate champions interested in the iteration process.
We heard from many enterprises that you rarely go in knowing exactly what the solution will be and that solutions will evolve as you implement them. Therefore, finding champions in the government who are interested in the iteration process is important — but takes intentional effort up front. VillageReach, along with other collaborators, was testing the efficacy of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Malawi to deliver health commodities. In one test flight, the UAV crashed. While the government partners could have easily shut down the program because it was too high risk, they instead sat down with VillageReach and other collaborators to learn and iterate for the future (see below).
Cultivating Champions for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Project:
VillageReach invested a significant amount of time bringing together people who were clear on the vision and risks of the UAV project. Factors key to this approach included:
1. Engaging government and partners from the beginning, allowing them to be more informed and engaged champions.
2. Clearly articulating that the undertaking was a study to better understand operational efficiency and impact and included a safety and emergency protocol.
3. Including a variety of government stakeholders — not only the Ministry of Health but also regulatory bodies, such as Civil Aviation and the Department of Defense.
4. Engaging Ministry of Health officials as co-investigators on the study.As a result, there was significant ownership of the work within the MoH and the Steering Committee, a clear understanding that this was a study with potential operational risk, established trust among partners, and a transparent process around addressing and reporting on any issues that arose during the study.
Read next: Top Tip: Listen, Be Humble, Respect, Manage the “What Ifs?” of government partnerships, or return to see all articles in Government Partners.
Access the full PDF of Leveraging Government Partnerships for Scaled Impact here or the key takeaways checklist here.
This article was written by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin, and released in September 2018.
