6
Administration, Finance, and International Operations: Strengthening Operations and the Implementation Chain
A Tale of Two Libraries
We decided to make one last stop on the long ride back to the hotel in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, after a great day of visiting schools. The schools we visited in the morning had been waiting for us. They knew we were coming and were prepared to show us why they appreciated Room to Read support. Despite its being late in the school year in September 2014, when students were busy preparing for exams, students and community members still took the time to welcome foreign visitors. Children waited outside to greet us. School administrators were dressed in their nicest clothes. Even parent representatives from the school management committee were at the school to answer questions, express appreciation, and gently request additional support. Often district education officials are on hand to show they are actively engaged.
We always ask schools not to go out of their way. We know that everyone is busy with many more important things to do than greet international Room to Read staff. Yet the red carpet is rolled out (figuratively most of the time but literally in some instances, too), and so we often go through this ritual. In contrast, unannounced school visits give us a chance to see what really goes on in a school. There is no time for libraries to be set up or for children to practice responses.
It was easy to make unannounced school visits that day without being too conspicuous. We had just been in the area earlier in the week to facilitate an area-wide reading competition. The competition brought together children from communities throughout the region to participate in reading-themed sport activities (for example, a reading relay, in which children had to read a few pages of a book out loud before they could run down the field and tag their next team member), with hundreds of teachers and parents cheering the children on. Room to Read was a known quantity. We were therefore confident that we were working within the rules to stop at two adjacent primary schools off the main road that tracks the spectacular coast on the way back to Dar es Salaam.
What is interesting about these two schools is that Room to Read was supporting just one of them at the time. Another organization had been supporting libraries in the area, and we had agreed with that organization to focus our efforts on the schools that had not been previously been served.
We started our unannounced visit with the school that Room to Read had not been supporting. As is the custom, we walked to the office of the head teacher. She was happy to see us, as she knew Room to Read. Many of her children had participated in the reading event earlier that week. She took us to the room that housed the school library and tried to open the door. It was locked, so she excused herself to go find the key. It took some time for her to return; she initially did not know which of the teachers had the key. Eventually she found it and opened the door with a smile.
We entered a small room that did not seem to get much use. On one side was a series of dusty, dilapidated bookcases with a small number of books strewn about in semirandom piles on each shelf. Some shelves had taped, paper labels of the letters of the alphabet, presumably to alphabetize the storybooks, but there did not seem to be any real attempt at organization. Two other cases were blocked by a table on which there were precarious stacks of storybooks. The other side of the room was used as storage space for broken furniture. These included broken desks and chairs piled close together. Sharp, broken edges protruded dangerously from the pile. The only pieces of artwork on display were a few paper plates taped to the wall with colored animal faces on them and a painting of a large baobab tree on its side on top of one of the cases.
This was not what we would consider a child-friendly space, yet the head teacher was very proud of it. She appreciated the book donations and was happy to have a library. We asked about the school’s ongoing interaction with the organization that helped set up the library. The head teacher said there was not much contact. The organization helped to organize the space initially and donated the books but did not help establish meaningful organizational or checkout systems or help school staff learn how to promote use of the books.
We thanked the head teacher and made the short walk to the second school. As we approached the second school library, the doors were wide open. Even though the formal school day had ended, there were still children and teachers milling about. The school librarian was busy attending to others but welcomed us with a nod. The space was three to four times as large as the first library. It was meant to accommodate frequent use by large classes of children. There were two big mats for children to sit on, with some pillows scattered on the floor.
Bookcases lined two of the four walls. They were painted brightly in blue, red, green, and yellow, reflecting the level of difficulty of books that were organized on each one. Shelves with neatly stacked books were labeled with photos of the animals that represented each book level: fish for blue, rooster for red, butterfly for green, and elephant for yellow. Colorful posters filled the wall space. These included the alphabet; maps of Tanzania, Africa, and the world; bodies and body parts; and health and hygiene. The wall also included a chart of the weekly class schedule for visiting the library. The librarian’s desk included the checkout registry and registry of books. The space was clean, bright, and welcoming.
The point of contrasting these two libraries is not to cast aspersions on another organization’s work or to pat ourselves on the back. We have been there ourselves! We’ve seen Room to Read libraries in the past that have resembled the first library described here. Focusing implementation in our early days on simply establishing libraries, stocking them with books, and moving on to the next school created a huge amount of uncertainty about what would happen to those spaces over time. Some of our earliest libraries were fantastic, while others were not. This had as much to do with school leadership and its interest in maintaining library spaces as it was a consequence of Room to Read’s actions.
The difference between then and now is our implementation strategy. We decided many years ago that simply creating large numbers of libraries would not be sufficient. Nor would donating used English-language children’s books. Nor would giving girls’ families money for school tuition and school uniforms. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have 100 locked libraries with broken bookshelves and dusty books if the same investment can support ten thriving libraries that are the focal point of school and community reading. We had to do something differently in our program implementation to increase the likelihood of achieving results. And we did! We were a young but rapidly growing organization, and we had learned a lot about what we needed to do better.
The differences between our old and new implementation strategies lay in how we structured professional development activities for school staff and hired school-level support staff. As described in Chapter 4, it was at this time that we started to create training workshops and ongoing monitoring support visits to prepare school staff to implement projects with quality and sustain them over time instead of just establishing libraries and filling them with books. This required hiring a new cadre of country staff members, including staff to conduct workshops and do school-level monitoring and coaching.
Overall Approach to Program Implementation
Our goal in evolving our implementation strategy has been clear from the start: growth with quality in everything we do. However, this is easier said than done, especially when staff are geographically spread out across time zones and oceans and speak multiple languages. As we fine-tuned our implementation over time, the pendulum swung back and forth between highly centralized to decentralized ways to improve the value we were delivering, but with one constant: All action is focused on the goal of providing high-quality educational opportunities for children. We knew that evolving our operational and implementation strategies had to be rooted in our organizational mission and theory of change but also aligned with the stage of development we were in at any given time. We also needed to be clear about changes along the way and the reasons for them so staff could understand and orient their own evolving functions appropriately.
Organizational Structure and Functions
Room to Read implements its historical country programs in similar ways in each of the nine countries in which we have country offices and full programs. These offices coordinate the work in countries and contextualize our global program content for local circumstances, manage program implementation, advocate, and negotiate with governments and other country stakeholders, and act as a communication hub for country staff. Field-based staff then have the most important job of all: delivering high-quality programming and support to schools and communities. Staff in regional offices throughout countries are responsible for facilitating training activities and managing school-based program activities. We then have staff who support the work in schools themselves. This includes staff members who monitor and coach the literacy work happening in classrooms, manage the library, and work with girls and their families. Finally, each of our country offices has staff members who are responsible for research, monitoring, and evaluation. These staff develop study designs and data collection tools, as well as oversee data collection, processing, and analysis.
The country office structure is meant to scale. In countries with fewer projects that are less geographically dispersed, we hire fewer program officers, program associates, and school-level staff. However, for countries with large portfolios, we hire the appropriate number of staff members for oversight and support.
FIGURE 6.1 Example Staffing Structure for the Room to Read Global Office and a Country Office.
Implementation
Room to Read’s implementation approach combines periodic workshops with ongoing coaching and support visits. This is true for the Girls’ Education Program as well as for the Literacy Program. In the Girls’ Education Program, our school-level social mobilizers work directly with girls. We train these women in workshops. Program associates then conduct periodic school visits to observe and support the mobilizers. Similarly, in the Literacy Program, school administrators, librarians, and teachers participate in periodic workshops. The workshops explain program concepts and how to implement program activities. Regular school visits then allow library management facilitators and literacy coaches to monitor program implementation and offer guidance and support.
One of the most important aspects of our implementation approach is community coinvestment and the gradual transition of responsibility from the project team to schools and communities.
Room to Read’s initial interactions with leaders in any new community in which we are hoping to work involve frank discussions about roles and responsibilities. We then negotiate with leaders to decide whether they would like to coinvest in a long-term project with us. Not only does Room to Read choose its communities, but they choose us, too.
After 18 years of work, we have a good sense about what Room to Read programming can achieve. Successful programming, though, relies on substantial community buy-in and partnership. This is an essential step to the longer-term transition of project ownership to communities and schools after projects end. It is one of the prerequisites for Room to Read’s investment in new projects. Geographical targeting is another critical aspect of program implementation. Decisions about which geographies to target, for example, have huge consequences for logistics and costs. Transportation costs in particular can be high, and the logistics of coordinating travel to disperse geographies can also be challenging.
Strengthening the Implementation Chain
Key to Room to Read’s progress in evolving our implementation systems is constantly reminding ourselves about our implementation chain (see Figure 6.2). The chain starts with a global design, which, in the case of Room to Read, is based on years of country experience. The global design is then translated and contextualized for each country but then changes more as the content moves from the country office through the cascade of staff members all the way to school-level implementation. As Figure 6.2 shows, the original design inevitably changes and becomes less like the original as it cascades from the start to the end of the implementation chain.
FIGURE 6.2 Room to Read’s Implementation and Feedback Chain.
The goal of a functional implementation chain is to maintain as much fidelity as possible to the original program design as appropriate for the local context. This requires being very clear about the roles and responsibilities in the organization, from the people responsible for program design, to those responsible for contextualizing the programs in each country, to the people implementing the program activities in every school. It also includes the feedback loop at each step along the way: defining the processes by which staff members at each point in the implementation chain provide feedback to staff members from the previous step about what is and isn’t working.
Clarifying roles, responsibilities, and communication processes is critical for understanding when one or more links in the implementation chain is weak or broken. Anyone who has played the children’s game of telephone knows that any original message inevitably becomes distorted, sometimes wildly, as it cascades from one person to another. In an international organization, in which communication regularly jumps thousands of miles and is filtered through different cultures, languages, and individual biases, relaying expectations and intent is even more difficult. It makes it that much more important that messages are clear and communication strategies are explicit from the outset.
As shown in Figure 6.2, you should always expect some loss of fidelity in any original program design or contextualized program design. A social mobilizer implementing girls’ education life-skills discussions in a school will never have a complete understanding about what was in the mind of the person who originally designed the activity. However, fidelity should remain a priority because, as we discussed in Chapter 5, it helps you identify whether any specific problem is due to program design or project implementation.
The Three Phases of Program Implementation
It should not be a surprise that an implementation strategy is core to the success to any organization that provides goods or services, including organizations in the nonprofit sector. It is essential for Room to Read. Ultimately, as summarized in Table 2.3 and reproduced in Table 6.1, the ultimate goal of any implementation strategy should be to provide targeted, high-quality goods and services on time, on demand, and in a way that is scalable. The way that an organization accomplishes its goals, though, can differ markedly depending on its phase of development. It can be difficult to achieve your targeted goals at the early stages of program implementation, especially in an organization that focuses on underserved communities in low-income countries. It is certainly not likely overnight. Thinking strategically about implementation is just as important as designing your programs. At Room to Read, we still have a long way to go to achieve an on-demand implementation strategy, but we are continuing to work hard to get there.
TABLE 6.1 Phases of Program Implementation
| Theories of change | Phase of development | ||
| Start-Up | Transition | Maturity | |
| Implementation | Emphasize local experimentation | Consolidate lessons from local implementation, with focus on program quality | Target support to enhance program outcomes efficiently and with more impact |
Like the program development cycle, you should plan for a period of experimental development, followed by a consolidation of lessons learned, before assuming that it will be possible to target support in an efficient way. Of course, this bird’s-eye view does not happen in an orderly way. There are always mini cycles of centralization and decentralization, particularly when developing new products and services. However, we have found it helpful to keep track of the larger trend of organizational maturity as Room to Read has worked through its various phases of development.
Implementation During Start-Up
Like the evolution of Room to Read’s program models, we experimented with many different program implementation strategies during start-up. We tried everything. Each country implemented differently and had different implementation chain structures. Erin recalls the first worldwide country management conference in 2004, when the worldwide leadership came together for the first time in Kathmandu, Nepal. There were heated debates about the best way to implement program activities, the only common elements among countries being “books” and “girls.” In the Literacy Program, some countries had installed bookshelves in each classroom while others moved library books around schools in mobile carts. Still others kept books in central school libraries. The India country director advocated strongly for teacher training and capacity building while the Nepal country director wanted to focus on developing guidance manuals that could be dropped off at schools.
In the Girls’ Education Program, some countries had begun to pay boarding fees for girls to attend distant schools. The belief was that this was going to be the best way to support a quality education. Other countries thought it was culturally inappropriate for girls to be so far away from their families.
These meetings were exciting because of the creativity and problem-solving that took place. Some of our early decisions were deeply rooted in cultural norms and countries’ geographies and administrative systems. Others were based on country directors’ own experiences or ideas. Everything was on the table. Do we hire our own staff to implement project activities or do we contract services to local organizations? Do we concentrate our work in a small geographical area, or do we try to spread our visibility and influence? How much do we expect local communities to contribute before we commit to a new project in a geography?
One of the innovations that came out of the 2004 Country Management Conference was new language about implementation and the concepts of “nonnegotiables” and “preferred ways of working.” Nonnegotiables were the implementation strategies that would be required of all countries, whereas preferred ways of working were more about promising practices that countries were advised to consider but were not required to adopt.
An example of a nonnegotiable in our Literacy Program was that libraries must have books in the local language, whereas a preferred way of working was they could also have children’s books in English if they felt these would be useful to the school library. In our Girls’ Education Program, we decided early on, as a nonnegotiable, that only women would be hired to work directly with the girls. A preferred way of working would be that different kinds of financial or material support could be provided to the girls to support them, depending on the community and family situation, ranging from paying school fees to providing uniforms, a bicycle, or bus fare for girls living far from school.
Our worldwide leadership began to grapple with the question of how much of Room to Read’s work could and should be standardized across countries and how much should be left to local leadership. It can sound quite democratic and enlightened to talk about freedom of choice and local control. However, as we described in Chapter 4, you pay a price—sometimes quite high—for using diverse approaches. At the same time, given Room to Read’s penchant for close observation, reflection, and revision, we did learn from this diversity that there were better and worse ways to implement program activities. And although local preferences are important, organizations must be open to the lessons that they are learning from actual experience, be as objective as possible in their analysis of the empirical information, and adjust implementation as necessary when they identify better ways of working.
The principle, as summarized by a board member with a strong background in international development, is for ESEs to think about central policies and local management. That is, ESEs should consider more centralized oversight for activities that have strong proof of success, are expensive to design or require global technical expertise, are necessary for ethical or moral purposes or to promote equity, or are needed to maintain organizational cohesion across countries (for example, human resource policies). At the same time, organizations should emphasize local approaches when subtle local information is too expensive to gather and track centrally and in a bureaucratic manner or local approaches are critical for generating buy-in by empowering local staff and partners as codesigners.
Implementation During the Transition Phase
One of the clear lessons that came out of the start-up phase is that we needed a strategy for ensuring program quality. As described in Chapter 2, it was no longer merely enough to establish a new library and fill it with books, or to give a girl a scholarship to pay for school fees. It was too easy for schools to express appreciation for the work and then forget about it, as we saw from the first Tanzania school at the beginning of this chapter. The sad state of some of our early libraries was never because of bad intent. Schools simply did not have the knowledge and experience or, in some cases, the motivation, to make our services work for them. We needed some mechanism to ensure that schools could use the libraries and books effectively and that girls were progressing in school and at less risk of dropping out.
We began to crave hard evidence about the actual impact our work was having. We needed new strategies to capture that information. Access to regular, concrete information to improve project quality was a critical missing piece in our process to improve our programs.
It was therefore during the transition period that Room to Read invested heavily in school-level support staff and country-level monitoring systems. We institutionalized these positions formally into the implementation chain. This decision transformed our implementation approach. We needed to think about what these staff members would do and how often they would visit schools. We needed a system to train and supervise school-level staff. We needed to build a project-tracking database to house all the school site- and girl-specific information our staff were collecting to inform the quality of our implementation and program design.
Key to success was customizing the database and using it consistently over the years to track our program outputs and outcomes. That required investing in mid-level country staff members: program associates, most often, who would oversee and support the school-level social mobilizers, library management facilitators, and, later in our evolution, literacy coaches. We also had to agree on global indicators, map out the kinds of data we wanted to collect, and then customize the database to house the relevant information. Given the growth of our project portfolios in countries, we also needed a certain number of program officers to oversee the program associates and report to program managers.
On the monitoring side, we also began to hire monitoring and evaluation associates and officers who would visit schools at least once per year to collect our annual program indicator information and verify the regular monitoring information that was coming from the mobilizers and facilitators. This staffing structure was becoming complex and expensive. But it was what we believed—and still believe—to be the necessary infrastructure to sustain quality outcomes.
These new investments in school-level support and monitoring, though, exacerbated some of the tensions that we were just beginning to understand during start-up. For example, it is much more difficult to implement school-level support when projects are spread over a large geography. This was less of an issue in setting up projects initially, as costs were limited largely to projects’ set-up expenses. However, ongoing school visits over the course of years require substantial planning. Then there are the costs for transportation, lodging, and daily allowances (per diems) when staff members stay in remote areas overnight, and additional considerations if some areas are less accessible in rainy seasons.
Another tension that became more acute during the transition period was determining how we were going to structure implementation at the school level. In Africa and Southeast Asia, in most instances, we did this directly by hiring Room to Read employees as school-level support staff. In South Asia, most school-level implementation was done through local partner organizations. In these situations, Room to Read still staffed most positions in the implementation chain. It was just the very last link of school-level support (that is, social mobilizers, library management facilitators, and later, literacy coaches) that would become the responsibility of local partners. The logic for working with partners in South Asia was that these community-based nonprofit organizations had direct relationships with communities. They would be able to mobilize quickly with high levels of trust and respect. In addition, helping local organizations implement Room to Read programs was a great way to build their capacity and increase the likelihood of sustaining programming even after Room to Read left a geographical area. Local organizations could then continue to support schools and even expand the work to new areas with their expertise.
Room to Read’s transition phase was a time of high growth. We were implementing more than 1,000 new literacy projects per year—an average of three per day! We established projects, trained staff and school personnel, and monitored not only the new sites but also all our other literacy projects and girls already in the programs. This was a serious logistical challenge, but visiting remote schools in places from Salavan in Laos to Kafue in Zambia, to Chitwan in Nepal was highly motivating. We would arrive at a school and find children running toward the library at recess time to grab a book or listen to a teacher reading. We saw new authors and illustrators winning awards for the quality of their children’s books. The work felt vibrant, dynamic, and fulfilling—and completely exhausting. After spending years in the transitional phase, though, we were ready to evolve into a more mature organization.
Implementation During the Mature Phase
As we reflect upon on the growing maturity of our implementation, we should say that Room to Read is perhaps still not as mature in this dimension as in other aspects of our work. We did not invest as much in our operational systems early in our history as was necessary given our rapid growth. We do have a clear vision for implementation success and have begun to execute our plans in some ways, but we still have far to go. Operating in two major program areas on multiple continents requires hard work and patience. However, we are starting to see the fruits of these efforts and believe that innovating implementation is one of the most promising and exciting aspects of Room to Read’s future.
The biggest difference in implementation in the mature phase is that it needs to be more demand driven and focused at increasingly higher levels of impact. During the transition phase, Room to Read structured its program implementation around a core approach. We worked with ministry of education officials and other partners to identify potential partner communities, became smarter about how to select geographical areas in which to work, established working relations with targeted communities and schools, and regularly conducted workshops and ongoing monitoring and support visits.
The problem with this approach is that it emphasizes our own schedules and doesn’t necessarily align to schools’ actual needs. How do we know, for example, that four years of ongoing school support is the right amount of time to sustain long-term teacher success in reading instruction? Could this require substantially more time? Perhaps a lot less time? The truth is, we still do not know. Nor does anyone else. However, as we explained in Chapter 5, we are starting to analyze the classroom observation forms from reading lessons to answer these questions. This information will enable us to be much more responsive to the actual needs of teachers instead of merely following a rigid plan, albeit in a more structured and strategic way than in the past.
Tools for Operational Accountability
In our mature phase, we also created tools to clarify operational responsibility and accountability. We have found that having tools to ensure clarity in operational and implementation roles and responsibilities goes a long way to building an aligned and highly functioning global organization. One of the most important tools we have created is our performance implementation management system that we discussed in-depth in Chapter 5. Two other tools that have been particularly helpful at Room to Read are management dashboards and our delegation of authority matrix.
Management Dashboards The ethos of “What gets measured, gets done” that we use in our program operations applies throughout Room to Read. In our more mature stage of development, we have created a series of dashboards for each country of operation and, in a slightly simplified form, for each technical-assistance project. These dashboards roll up to a global management dashboard, which is a key monitoring tool for our management team. Results of the global management dashboard in turn feed into quarterly reporting to our board of directors.
One of the challenges of building dashboards is trying to streamline them while still serving the needs of multiple audiences. Our dashboards cover all critical functional areas of the organization (outlined in Figure 6.1) and generally include 6–12 metrics for each department. Each metric then includes an annual target and a quarterly flag for progress in reaching that target (green for tracking well to target, yellow for slightly off target, and red for major issues in meeting target). For example, for our human resource department, some of our performance metrics are the percentage of positions that are vacant, turnover, percentage of staff who are female, percentage of management who are female, and staff satisfaction. Our goal is to have a visual snapshot of the health of each country operation and our global office departments at our fingertips. It is important, though, as with all data collection, not to make the dashboard too complex or lengthy to avoid overloading users.
Delegation of Authority Matrix We developed our global delegation of authority matrix at Room to Read to help alleviate the tensions that inevitably occur in a growing organization around “Who gets to make what decisions at what level of the organization?” During times of dynamic growth, it’s important to embrace decentralization of authority so that decisions can be pushed to the lowest appropriate level in the organization. By doing this, you can be nimble and fast-moving. The tricky part, particularly in an international organization working across multiple geographies and in multiple languages, is communicating clearly what types of decisions specifically can be made by what level of employee. Thus, we created a delegation-of-authority policy that ensured consistency and clarified who had authority for approving actions at different levels of funding. This matrix also specifies who may sign various contracts. Like our management dashboards, the delegation-of-authority matrix covers every functional area of our business. For example, our HR delegation-of-authority policy clearly states who can approve new headcounts, adjust salaries, award benefits, give promotions, and approve professional development budgets. We review and update our delegation-of-authority matrix annually as our organization continues to evolve.
Specifying this level of detail may sound tedious, bureaucratic, and perhaps overkill. It’s certainly a far cry from our start-up days when we made many of these decisions through phone conversations or e-mail. However, we have found that at our current mature size of more than 1,500 employees, we would otherwise face huge bottlenecks. Before we created the matrix, we were making many decisions on an ad hoc basis, criteria were being applied differently across different teams and country operations, and we were spending more time trying to solve internal challenges that arose from this ambiguity than focusing on our work. After we developed our delegation-of-authority matrix, we regained precious time to focus on activities that added value to our mission.
Developing and managing systems and processes are not always the most fun part of the job, but some investment up front can allow you much more time for higher-level, strategic activities as you grow.
External Technical Assistance
One of the most exciting, demand-driven implementation innovations we made during the mature phase of organizational development was to begin offering “external technical assistance.” This is a new kind of service delivery for Room to Read that goes beyond our full-country implementation. Rather than implementing project activities ourselves or through partners, we train government officials and professionals from other organizations in Room to Read programming.
This approach allows us to move up the implementation chain from directly supporting girls (in our Girls’ Education Program) and teachers (in our Literacy Program) and enables us to work at district, provincial, or national levels to increase system-level support for our activities; or simply leverage the interest of others, such as governments or other nonprofit organizations that have shown interest in undertaking work in line with Room to Read approaches. The ability to offer external technical assistance builds our system-level capacity to have a sustained impact in a much more profound way than we could do in the past.
Government implementation chains are not very different from ours at Room to Read. They are just at a completely different order of magnitude, and in some cases, may be constrained or helped by existing policy (for example, decentralization policy). Governments and other organizations, too, need to figure out ways to translate program designs into local action. In most instances, as with Room to Read, the closer a government’s implementation is aligned with the original design, the greater the impact—and more likely the impact will be sustained. Figure 6.3 shows how Room to Read activities are intended to influence governments’ implementation chains.
FIGURE 6.3 Level of Influence of Room to Read Implementation.
The figure illustrates the various levels in the cascade. The goal of effective technical assistance is to promote fidelity of successful implementation from the beginning to the very end of the chain. With the start of our external technical-assistance work, Room to Read’s implementation activities are now interjected into government implementation chains at different entry points. Our direct implementation works primarily at the classroom level while our technical assistance works at higher levels of the educational system. The goal, of course, is to do such a good job at whatever point we are working in the government system that news of our efforts trickles up and influences ever-higher levels of the government implementation chain. This is how we attempt to strengthen our impact and sustain our efforts.
The launch of Room to Read’s technical-assistance practice was the result of our 2015–2019 strategic plan objective to be more strategic, accelerate our impact, and to “do more with less”—a common goal for any scale-up effort. As we had been evolving our programming to that point in time, we had a new set of worldwide implementation packages that had been tested extensively and validated in different countries, as well as a growing set of organizational skills to contextualize the packages for individual country use. We also continued to receive regular requests from other organizations and governments to share our knowledge and approach. Still, we had no mechanism to do so other than our full-country programming.
We therefore launched “Room to Read Accelerator” in January 2015 as our new technical-assistance practice area to meet these needs. The goal was to promote technical-assistance services as a way to have strategic influence on educational implementation chains to complement our school-level direct implementation. This was an exciting proposition but also a complex one that had tremendous implications for our organizational infrastructure and approach to implementation.
Incorporating Accelerator into Our Program Implementation
Even during the earliest days of planning for the Accelerator, our management team realized that we would have to think differently about various issues. For example, our programmatic approach for literacy and girls’ education was based on the idea that schools needed a comprehensive set of approaches for children to benefit. Either Room to Read, other partners, or the school itself needed to implement a specific set of activities well if they wanted the children to succeed. Deciding to prioritize technical-assistance projects could put us in situations in which only pieces of our programs would be implemented and most likely be implemented by others instead of Room to Read staff. We therefore had to be comfortable with the possible trade-off of more children receiving services but perhaps at a more limited level of intensity or comprehensiveness.
In many ways, we covered our eyes and peeked through our fingers in starting our technical-assistance work. We dipped our proverbial toe in the water. We acknowledged that adding this new complex capability to our organization would be a risky experiment. We would want to reflect on the experience at specific intervals over time to make sure that it was worthwhile. The first reflection point would be a 2017 review. This would be in the middle of our five-year strategic plan period and a good time to re-examine our assumptions, reflect on challenges and successes to date, and be rigorous in learning about what was working and what need to be improved. To what extent have the investments in technical-assistance projects contributed to our organizational goals? The results of the review would then guide Room to Read’s future investments in technical assistance.
Another important consideration in any decision to pursue technical-assistance projects is their opportunity costs. Again, we realized that project activities will be at least somewhat different from our core programming and potentially less comprehensive than what we might otherwise recommend to ensure children’s success. So, a big question for our review has been, “What have the opportunity costs been for accepting these kinds of projects as compared to what would have been an alternative investment in regular program implementation?” In other words, is implementing technical assistance worth it?
In addition, the spirit of most of our technical-assistance project activities is that we share our ideas with others but that they must make the decisions about what they will do with that information themselves. This is also very different from Room to Read’s direct implementation, in which our staff are directly responsible for program outcomes.
Equally as important, we decided that we would only pursue technical-assistance projects that would contribute to our organizational mission. We did not want to become more of a traditional government-contracting organization that geared itself to respond to a wide range of issues. The decision about how close a technical-assistance request is to our organizational mission is close enough is extremely subjective. We are already opening ourselves to substantial risk of mission creep by choosing to do technical assistance in the first place. Even with the best of intentions, it is possible for different people to interpret the same funding opportunity differently. However, the intent of the global management team is to be hypervigilant in considering the efficacy of “go/no-go” decisions so that we can be as true to our mission as possible.
Last, the global management team uses other criteria as well when deciding to pursue any new technical-assistance project. For example, we decided that any new project must bring enough funding at least to cover all expected direct project costs. Although Room to Read does have some discretionary funding at its disposal, we would not be able to keep the organization alive for any length of time if we were to spend more money over time than we raise. This is a very difficult message to convey. After all, as people working in a mission-driven educational organization, we all want to ensure to we can help as many children as possible. We never want to say “no” to any request that could serve this interest. However, we need to continuously remind ourselves that providing services without the requisite funding behind this decision diminishes our overall organizational capacity to do good work.
The other major consideration for any specific “go/no-go” decision is our overall capacity to pursue a proposal and, subsequently, to implement the project. Do we have adequate staffing resources and experience to write a successful proposal? Have we worked in the area previously? If so, with what success? Do we currently have the staff, or can we quickly bring on the necessary talent to make the project successful without robbing resources from our existing activities? Is the government receptive to the work?
Our experience in implementing technical-assistance projects thus far has been quite positive. We have completed two successful technical-assistance projects, started nine others in five existing Room to Read countries and four new countries, and have one new project ready to begin in the next few months. We also have multiple opportunities each year so far to bid on new projects. We have secured approximately US$21 million of new funding and estimate that the current set of projects will benefit at least six million new children. However, as we describe in later chapters, incorporating this new approach into our overall work continues to be a challenge, and we have a long way to go to ensure smooth processes and systems.
The Pendulum Swingeth
As we have discussed previously, one of the ongoing challenges for any implementation organization—particularly for organizations with an international focus—is about control. Who designs and implements programs? Is it the central organization or the satellite offices? As described in Chapter 4, Room to Read’s path to programmatic excellence began with its openness to innovative local experimentation. It was through this diversity that we learned what works in each of our countries and how to structure our program design and implementation to meet the needs of as many children as possible.
As we moved deeper into the transition phase, Room to Read’s implementation became more consistent across countries. We became more efficient and delivered more consistent quality. This has been important for us to be able to manage implementation on a larger scale. While fully appreciating differences in local contexts, we’ve found that the advantages of consistent programming and implementation have far outweighed those of diversifying our portfolio based on local needs. We’ve benefited substantially by maintaining largely consistent staffing structures, implementation chains, hiring practices, and standard operating procedures.
Do we expect to be as firmly consistent in our implementation in the years ahead? Probably not. Developing consistency has been an important part of our evolutionary process, but it is not the final state. Even as we begin to relax our standard approaches somewhat, though, we will want to do it differently than in the start-up phase of our work. We now have much more clarity about what we are trying to achieve and how to achieve it.
Rather than promoting broad diversity, we will experiment more systematically and strategically, providing a much tighter set of options for demand-driven implementation and a more focused research and development process for new services. These require collaboration between the global office and the individual country offices to identify possible deviations from or enhancements to our core approach; to develop clear expectations for how this would work; and to monitor implementation so that we can understand what is working and what is not.
In addition, introducing our technical-assistance projects has offered us a new route to local experimentation. While these projects are still rooted deeply in our core approach, they are also tailored to meet client needs and not simply to replicate our direct implementation. Even now, we’re able to incorporate lessons from direct implementation into our technical-assistance work as well as share our experiences from technical-assistance projects with our full country teams.
Moving from one phase of organizational development to another does not necessarily mean a unidirectional change exclusively from decentralized to centralized implementation or vice versa. Room to Read’s experience is that the overall implementation strategy is more like a wave (with the continuation of many smaller waves as we potentially conduct research and development for new services). Figure 6.4 summarizes Room to Read’s own experience in negotiating this balance. Will this change again in the future? Perhaps there will be a move toward more decentralization. Someone can update the story then.
FIGURE 6.4 Wave of Centralization and Decentralization in Room to Read’s Overall Program Implementation.
The underlying message is that entrepreneurial leaders should be aware of their organizational needs at different times, be very clear with their teams about the reasons for shifting roles, and be ready to shift the wave in another direction if the organization can benefit.
Key Takeaways
Organizations live and die by implementation. You can have the best idea in the world and have a brilliant program model, but it is only through consistent, high-quality implementation that social enterprises can achieve their missions and achieve impact at scale. To summarize:
- Help staff to understand your organization’s implementation strategy at each stage of development. Doing so makes it easier for people to orient themselves and implement program activities in a consistent, high-quality manner.
- Take your time progressing through the start-up and transitional phases of development. Honor the fact that you need to grow in your knowledge and experience about what works over an extended period before trying to progress too quickly into mature implementation. Try various approaches, and experiment extensively along the way to learn as much as possible. The quality of your long-term approach will be higher and your relationships with partners and the communities that you serve will be stronger for taking the time to implement at each phase with care, thoughtfulness, risk, and reflection.
- Plan for the fact that implementation during the transition phase of development could be substantially more expensive and complicated than during the start-up phase. The shift in focus from simply “getting projects done” to “getting projects done with quality and impact” can require a layer of staffing, quality control, and system building that can require additional staff and processes that increase the challenges of the implementation approach substantially.
- Throughout all phases of development, remember that scaling effective programming is the ultimate goal. Knowing that your long-term goal is for communities, other organizations, and governments to adopt your most compelling program elements will help you design your implementation approach. You will be able to not only maximize your impact but also make it easier to understand, easier to implement, cost effective, and more easily transferable to others.
- Seek a balance between developing consistent, streamlined, effective execution at scale and creating space for continued learning, improvement, and innovation. Not all programs and countries will be at the same stage of development, particularly as organizations promote research and development of new services. Organizations need to build structured flexibility into their operating systems to accommodate this diversity.