This page is a part of the MandE NEWS site

Report on the DSA NGO study group meeting

on 2^nd November 1999, at ACORD, London.

Learning from development experience.

The purpose of the meeting was to explore a range of issues around learning from experience; how do people learn from the experience of others and when does learning lead to actual changes in behaviour, approach or understanding of issues. The subject was wide and each of the five speakers approached it from a different perspective; what marked the contributions was that they were all based on in-depth experience of thinking about the issues of sharing information, learning and changing, and the presentations revealed a depth of understanding and commitment.

Alice Welbourn opened the workshop by presenting some of the challenges to learning. Her talk entitled Beating the bounds or fording the frontiers presented very clearly a range of challenges that need to be confronted if learning is to take place, especially at the institutional level. She drew deeply on her own experiences as a development worker then a freelancer working in the field of behaviour change around the issue of HIV/AIDS; her work on this project led to the development of a training manual ‘Stepping Stones’ for use at village level and was based on experiences in Uganda. The experience of developing the manual and working subsequently to implement and adapt it highlighted some clear ways in which the challenges she presented can be met.

The challenges she drew attention to were the reality of boundaries between disciplines which prevent holistic approaches to development problems, something she feels is beginning to break down in recent years with the growing use of PRA, drama and psycho-social approaches to working at the local level. Then she highlighted the boundaries within agencies, between staff and senior management, between staff based in the field and those based in the UK and the problems faced in learning from staff on the front line and their difficulties sometimes in speaking out or being heard. The third area was that of boundaries between agencies where the familiar patterns of competition, secrecy, exclusivity often militate against sharing and learning; the challenge here is how to open up dialogue and flexibility, creativity and openness in a context of very real organisational constraints? The fourth area was the divide between ‘us’ and them, the north-south divide. It is common these days to hear that this divide is no longer an issue, but Alice highlighted how often problems are seen as belonging to the south and not shared also in the north, be they around poverty or sexual and reproductive health. Many of the issues of development are also in fact issues here and yet they remain unacknowledged and learning is usually seen as a one way process north to south and not south to north. Again there are some interesting exceptions beginning to emerge. The final challenge was the one of moving from saying to being, of changing as a result of learning, and she introduced ‘the wheel of change’ that has been developed from the Stepping Stones project showing the need to move from learning to sharing to caring to changing. Women and men are often at different points on the wheel of change and it is essential to take a gendered approach to learning.

The second speaker was Glen Williams who based his presentation on his past ten years experience as editor of the Strategies for Hope Series which has produced 15 booklets and three videos based on ‘good practice’ in the field of HIV/AIDS and distributed them widely to practitioners and also policy makers in countries around the world. His talk focused on trying to define good development practice in the field of sexual health, using a list of criteria for deciding what is indeed relevant, ethical and replicable. Once the good practice is identified then a series of other questions need to follow, including who is the audience and who needs to know about this good practice, what materials (videos, talks, written materials, language used) are relevant for that audience? Who is the best person/people to document this experience? Here he discussed the important role of the professional outsider in assisting people on the project to analyse their work and find ways to present it in a form that is accessible to others. He discussed some of the complex details of the logistics involved in documenting, publishing and then disseminating the information to those who can best use it, but time prevented a detailed analysis of the systems involved. He closed by asking the question can people learn from other people’s experience, is knowledge transferable? From the experiences and evaluations of the SFH series it is clear that knowledge can be shared and used outside the immediate context and while the details may not always be relevant in different cultural settings the ideas, concepts and broad approaches often are.

Glen Williams is completing the SFH series now (it is an ACTIONAID project) and is interested in working in fields outside of HIV/AIDS to further promote the documentation, publication and sharing of good development practice. This is an approach which his experience has shown does enable others to learn and change on the basis of experiences not their own.

The third talk was from HELPAGE, by Sylvia Beale and Mandy Heslop, who talked about learning within their organisation and network, and the need for Helpage staff to get a much deeper understanding of the needs and perspectives of older people and how to work with them. They have been working on a process in the UK to help their staff get to the heart of old people’s views, enabling them to start really listening and learning from old people themselves. They have developed a training course for staff to build their knowledge and confidence in working around issues of ageing and with older people, exploring especially why in this society old people are marginalised and how to address that. They have developed the course through participatory discussions, and participants themselves have been developing the course materials, enabling them to learn directly from their own work around the key principles of working with a gender perspective, upholding values and rights, promoting participation, and the need to relate practice and theory. From this course has developed a definition of ageism which lies at the heart of their work now and involves becoming personally age and self aware in order to challenge or enable others to move to such an understanding. The stress is that ageing is a very personal, as well as a development, issue; this echoed the point that Alice Welbourn made about not seeing development problems as ‘out there’ only, but also present here.

This is an innovative approach to enabling staff to learn from their own experience and the experience of other Helpage organisations in the network, and to promote a commitment to personal learning and constant review. They have an on-going participatory research project to promote the gathering and understanding of knowledge, to create spaces for sharing that knowledge and using it to build policy, and to find ways to constantly enhance the participation of older people themselves.

Colin Pringle of JSI UK was the fourth speaker, and he spoke on aspects of learning and sharing knowledge, and developing systems for this, that have perhaps become dominant in NGO ‘learning discourse’ in recent times. His focus was how to package and present and edit knowledge in such a way that it can be useful to other people. The task of JSI is to process information for use by DFID staff in the area of health and population, and they started by asking staff what they understand by information and what knowledge they need. They conducted a survey of HPD staff and found that while there is plenty of information flow there is not much movement of knowledge. People complain they never have the information they want at the time they want it, and while they want specific information they do not want more information. Much information is actually incommunicable because of formats, styles of writing, scope of reports, lack of clear lessons or recommendations.

JSI looked at past reports and evaluations and how they have been used and one task they are undertaking is to standardise reports and ensure that proper executive summaries are written, not by the report’s authors but by professional staff who know how to extract, précis and highlight key information. They are planning later to bring in other consultants to widen DFID’s knowledge and experience base, but meanwhile much of the work they do is tailoring information to individual requests and needs, something which is very time consuming. They are under pressure to exploit the web in information dissemination, but this has serious limits for many field offices even within DFID, who cannot access the web at all or only intermittently.

JSI are aware that information doesn’t flow smoothly, it often doesn’t come in accessible forms, there is information overload and consequently information often cannot lead to learning. This is the set of issues they are currently grappling with, alongside their other work for DFID.

The final speaker approached the subject from the angle of how communities can represent and manage their own learning about development, and how institutions can listen and respond (another angle altogether). Su Braden, who runs a Masters in TV and video for development (participatory video) at Reading University, talked on the basis of her extensive work in participatory video which is a process whereby local women and men control the video technology to enable them to analyse their own problems, to speak for themselves, to share their understanding within their communities and to represent themselves to the outside world- be it at the village, district, national or international level. Su explained the process of working with participatory video and the power that this technology potentially places in the hands of people who are usually the object and not the subject of development practice. Her questions, arising from her direct experience of working with video in this way and then sharing it with organisations, were can development agencies work with this kind of information and representation and learn from it? How possible is it for agencies that work in a written culture, with set forms and approaches to hear and understand and learn from oral cultural forms presented through videos made at the local level? How far is it possible to bring together two very different subjective realities and languages in order that learning can take place?

She talked of the barriers to people being able to learn from visual and oral forms rather than written reports, and their rigidity at times in responding to a variety of forms of communication. The challenge of participatory video is that it empowers people on the ground to tell their own story in the way that they see it and experience it (using forms of address that are culturally familiar to them such as speech, drama, songs, proverbs etc)- but can northern bureaucratic institutions find ways to hear what they are saying and learn from them and change their understandings, perceptions, and approaches if necessary? It seems often to be difficult for institutions to internalise different perceptions, priorities and agendas; systems of planning, evaluation and impact assessment can militate against accepting other forms of communication and other ways of representing the issues, and often empowerment is seen more as empowering people to do what the institution wants them to do rather than giving them the right to change what institutions do.

The talks were presented using overheads and video clips as well as some handouts and the range and depth of information shared and question raised were rich and varied. The day came to no conclusions, but rather the discussion raised further questions and issues for analysis; the day was thought provoking and informative across a range of critical questions around how do people learn? Who do they listen to? How can information be made relevant or accessible? And how far can sharing information and knowledge actually enable people to hear, learn and change. The debate will no doubt continue!

Tina Wallace

School of Business,

Oxford Brookes University,

Oxford.

9^th November 1999

Elsa Dawson edawson@oxfam.org.uk

Tina Wallace twal838066@aol.com

Glen Wlliams stratshope@aol.com

Colin Pringle cpringle@jsiuk.com

Su Braden sub@easynet.co.uk

Amanda Heslop aheslop@helpage.org

Sylvia Beales sbeales@helpage.org

Alice Welbourn padbourn@aol.com

Return to MandE NEWS