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| >> This is USAID >> Intersectoral Partnerships >> ISP Handbooks |
Inter-sectoral partnering is the process of creating and implementing joint venture initiatives -- or partnerships -- across civil society, government, and the private sector.1 This paper is a first cut at advancing the methods to assess inter-sectoral partnerships (ISPs). As inter-sectoral partnering becomes more prevalent, a more rigorous approach to measuring its impact is necessary in today's results-based development environment. This is a challenging task because: 1) inter-sectoral partnering is a relatively new concept without an extensive track record to analyze; and, 2) inter-sectoral partnerships are both a process and a result. The newness of ISPs and the lack of conventional indicators to assess them reflect the state of the art rather than any inherent difficulty in measuring them. This guide provides development professionals from donor institutions, civil society organizations, the business community and governmental institutions a framework to assist in documenting the results of inter-sectoral partnering. ISPs can further a number of development goals. They can strengthen individual organizations within each of the three sectors, offer a mechanism to resolve specific development issues, facilitate poverty reduction, and lay the foundation for broader, systemic change. By fostering increasingly rich host country institutional arrangements, such partnering can help societies significantly strengthen local capacity and build resilience to external and internal shocks. ISPs bring together diverse actors with varied incentives and capacities to address a common issue which, in turn, produces a new environment with an expanded set of incentives for each type of actor. This document will assist development professionals in the ongoing, iterative process of documenting the results of an inter-sectoral partnership by providing them with a framework of indicators. The framework allows development professionals the flexibility of choosing those indicators most appropriate to their particular partnership. The framework is used to assess the results of specific ISPs, rather than the ISP approach itself. While a variety of indicators used to measure the impact of partnering already exist, the framework presented here constitutes a new contribution to the field in that it introduces a holistic approach to assessing partnerships. The paper also serves to point readers toward sources that have successfully developed indicators that can be adapted to fit within the framework. Assessing Inter-Sectoral Partnering begins with an explanation of the use of indicators in performance monitoring and evaluation and summarizes USAID guidance on indicator selection and collection. Second, it discusses some of the challenges specific to assessing ISPs. Third, the guide proposes a framework to use when selecting indicators to measure the impact of ISPs and discusses existing indicators that fit within this framework. The framework, introduced in Section IV, is flexible and can be adapted to fit the needs of any development activity that involves an inter-sectoral partnership as a process and/or a result. Users can pick and choose from the menu of indicators to ensure that the indicators selected meet the unique needs of a specific partnership. |
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FOOTNOTES 1 - Civil society is the sphere of private, nonprofit organizations that express community beliefs and values through service provision and advocacy and contribute to collective goods and services. Government refers to general and specialized governance institutions at the local, national, and international levels. Lastly, business is the private, for-profit entities that produce private goods and services. Inter-sectoral partnerships (ISPs) are hybrid forms of organizational entities -- they can take the form of an NGO, a private sector entity, a governmental organization, or some mixture of two or three of the sectors. They can be of relatively short or long duration. (See Steve Waddell's work on ISPs, specifically the three he explores in India, Madagascar, and South Africa.) |
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