Guidance for teaching this competency
Content delivery
Short presentation to explain different organisational roles and mandates in the ‘aid delivery’ system. Provide practitioners with context-specific knowledge about donor priorities, organisational structure and accountability (to a board vs Parliament/Congress).
- General advice on content delivery
Scenarios & role plays
Develop a structured role play to simulate the interactions between market actors, the programme team and the donor agency. Assign each practitioner a role from one of those groups and give people descriptions of their role and key priorities. Break the game into stages to show the different interactions between the programme team and donor during:
- initial research
- making offer to partner
- monitoring partnership
- reporting results
Structure the interactions so the programme team interacts with market actors frequently and the donor infrequently – so that donor players are ‘surprised’ when plans change drastically from what they initially approved. Debrief at length with the team so that practitioners gain more empathy for donor constraints, pressures and access to information.
- General advice on scenarios and role plays
Coaching & mentoring advice
- Managers need to be strategic about how much pressure they put on practitioners to internalise donor constraints and realities, compared to how much they buffer staff from this.
- Support staff need to balance the focus on the end goal of achieving systemic change with the donor requirements for the types of interventions and activities that are acceptable. Call out practitioners who blatantly violate principles of market facilitation to stick to donor rules, but also keep in check those who consistently break the rules.