04 Oct HRH2030 Colombia Named a Winner in USAID CLA Case Competition
The HRH2030 Colombia team has been recognized a winner in the USAID 2019 Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) Case Competition.
Now in its fifth year, the CLA Case Competition is managed by the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting Team in the Office of Learning, Evaluation and Research in USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, with the USAID LEARN contract. The competition captures real-life case studies of USAID staff and implementing partners using a CLA approach for organizational learning and better development outcomes.
HRH2030’s case, “Strengthening Colombia’s Social Service Workforce through Collaboration and Learning,” highlights how the Colombia activity is using CLA approaches in its work with the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF) to provide violence prevention and protection services to children and families. HRH2030 has been supporting ICBF since April 2018 to strengthen the Colombia social service workforce through funding from the USAID Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF). The HRH2030 Colombia activity incorporated CLA approaches into this work from the very beginning, in order to build a trusting, open relationship with ICBF, ground activities in technical evidence, and provide opportunities for learning throughout the course of the activity and beyond. The approach places a strong emphasis on external collaboration with ICBF, robust formative evaluation to provide a technical evidence base for intervention planning, and formal opportunities to reflect and reinforce M&E for learning. As a result—made possible by the enthusiasm and openness of ICBF—the activity has been able to achieve new insights about the Colombia social services workforce and use this information to tailor interventions and recommendations.
“We incorporated the CLA approach not only throughout our own program cycle, but we also supported our partner, the ICBF, to integrate organizational learning and collaboration into its own processes,” says HRH2030 Colombia Project Director Juan Barco. “As we continue to implement CLA throughout our work, we will also continue to promote an organizational culture of learning within ICBF, believing that that this intense focus on learning will benefit the children, adolescents, and families of Colombia well into the future.”
This year’s competition received 97 submissions and named 10 winners. See the full list here. A searchable database of all winners since the competition’s inception is available here.
Photo: Ivonne Escobar of HRH2030 (right) poses with a group of ICBF social workers, after spending the day with them to evaluate their work in rural Colombian communities.