150 - Elevating Lived Experience through Storytelling: Learning from 10 Years of USAID’s Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) Case Competition

Abstract Information: USAID first introduced the Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) approach as part of its programming approach in 2011. Collaboration, learning, and adaptive management had always been part of USAID’s work, but the emphasis on CLA encouraged USAID staff and partners to approach them in an intentional, systematic, and resourced way. As the CLA team in headquarters worked to assist country offices in integrating collaboration, learning and adaptive management practices into their work, many practitioners asked for examples. Where was CLA already being practiced? Which processes, approaches and tools were working? How was CLA being used in different technical sectors? The CLA team understood that a number of examples were probably available, but due in part to the decentralized nature of USAID, they would likely not hear about many of them. Some experiences - including those of small local partners and historically underrepresented groups - might also be systematically overlooked. How could the team effectively capture and share examples of CLA in practice, elevate broader diversity of perspectives, and create avenues for local partners to tell their stories directly? The idea for a competition was born. The first CLA Case Competition was launched in 2015, when CLA was a new concept and practice was still relatively nascent within USAID. The annual competition has since continued to grow in popularity and is now a widely recognized and anticipated event for USAID and its implementing partners.

This session will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of USAID’s CLA Case Competition while also asking how we can best learn from what has become an incredible data source. The online library, hosted on USAID’s Learning Lab website, includes detailed stories of organizational learning and adaptive management in action, including many cases on strengthening evaluation use and influence within projects and organizations. The library is interactive and searchable by country, technical sector, CLA component, and submitting organization. Over the past decade, the Competition has generated over 700 examples of how international development organizations of all kinds are collaborating, learning and adapting in a variety of challenging environments around the world. Stop by this session to learn more about these stories. We'd be particularly interested in your feedback on how USAID might leverage this rich body of knowledge through meta analyses of cases to synthesize learning and spread promising practices. We'd love to hear: Which topical areas are of greatest interest? What lines of inquiry might we pursue and what methods would be most appropriate? More broadly, how can and should we leverage written storytelling to strengthen evaluation utilization and learning practices?