To work together, we need to learn together

Humanitarian leaders have a responsibility to carve out space and time for learning within their organisations, but donors also have a vital role, writes Harpinder Collacott, Executive Director of Mercy Corps Europe.

In the humanitarian sector, it’s very important to learn from our own work, and think about what can be learned from across the sector.

We can spend so much time involved in what we’re doing, so individually-focused, we can forget to look externally to see what other organisations are learning, where there might be similarities that could inform our own programming. I would love to see more of that. We need to consider how to better collaborate with partners to create and test much more joint learning. If you’re going to work together, you need to learn together.

At the moment, I am spending a lot of time with Mercy Corps’ climate smart commitment team and our teams implementing climate resilience programmes. We want to better understand how we can share our learning with the wider sector but also learn more from what others are doing – it is a ‘learning accelerator’ for climate resilience.

It’s partly internal, but we’re also looking at partnerships with thinktanks and Southern academic institutions to be able to think and learn together. There’s a lot of bright thinking happening in the academic space and it is great to bring that together with organisations who are ‘learning through doing’, like Mercy Corps.

Learning needs to start before you set up projects and start to implement. It is important to analyse results and important programme learning, as well as share information with each other through peer-to-peer exchanges and other effective platforms, before jumping into programme design and implementation.

There is definitely a lot of motivation within the sector for this, but it’s not something we’re always funded to do. Without adequate funding for learning platforms, it becomes difficult for NGOs to sustain them outside of specific programmes.

As organisations reliant on restricted funding, we tend to be constrained by what is and is not funded, and the parameters set by individual donors. What is in the programme proposal will end up getting done – for example, we will produce learning if it is part of donor reporting, but whether this is widely shared will be dependent on funding for communications and dissemination. Anything outside of that is a nice-to-have, a luxury, but not a necessity.

So we need to look more systematically at setting up issue-specific learning collaborations. Donors can play an important role by calling for greater cross-organisation and programme collaboration. One of the best I’ve witnessed were the learning collaboratives funded under the former-DFID’s Programme Partnership Agreements (PPAs), which brought all recipients together to learn together from each other’s programming.

There also have to be leaders pushing for real learning at all levels and stages of a programme cycle, creating space for organisations to come together and learn, to better understand which structures and approaches encourage learning and challenge barriers to learning.

Incorporating funding for cross-organisational, collaborative learning, and actually building this into programming, would bring a significant shift in the way humanitarian organisations learn. There is huge value in structuring learning so donors feel it is an important investment for them, as well as supporting the sector more widely.

There’s a big appetite for change on this and I do see a shifting of power in the way funding is designed and delivered – naturally, this will force organisations to think differently about how they work together.

When Mercy Corps set up in Ukraine two years ago, we knew we had to operate differently to achieve impact. Our response is 100% partner-driven in design and delivery. There has been a lot of really intense work and mistakes have been made along the way which have been critical to inform learning. The first year was really quite challenging for us all, but there was also a lot of great learning. Ukraine has set the wheels in motion for humanitarian response for the next decade.

Real-time learning is so critical in these situations, before we quickly adapt and move onto the next crisis or response. I’m a big proponent of making sure we are gathering information, managing knowledge and articulating it into case studies or lessons learned in real time, as it can become diluted very quickly.

Of course, the humanitarian sector has to be very responsive and reactive, due to fast-changing issues, crises and policies. That can create a culture where there isn’t always time to reflect and learn, before moving on. Learning and change can happen at a slower pace in organisations which are constantly responding.

So leaders have a responsibility to build a culture of ‘stopping to learn’ within our organisations, along with better knowledge management and sharing systems which enable the wider learning and collaboration that we all need to succeed.