---

Report of the NPI Learning Team January 1997 The New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) promotes the art and habit of strategic partnering for collective problem-solving at the community level. The NPI Resource Guide is the report of the NPI Learning Team to the Administrator of USAID. It brings together the results of the NPI Learning Phase (in which 15 USAID Missions participated) and is designed as a tool for strategic partnering. Relevant policy and program guidance will be issued as appropriate pending final review by USAID senior management. (Second edition.)

---

Table of Contents

---

Downloading this entire document
You may download this entire document in a self-extracting zip file by clicking here. Please note that this document is approximately 1.5 MEGABYTES in length. Once the file has downloaded, open it in your file manager and it will automatically expand into 30 WordPerfect documents.

Downloading individual sections
You may download the full-text version of each chapter/section by clicking on the symbol. These files are in Word Perfect format and may also be viewed in Microsoft Word.

---

VOLUME I

Executive Summary --Click here to view the full-text of Executive Summary

I. Synthesis Report

1. Introduction
2. Overview of the NPI Resource Guide
3. A Strategic Approach to Development Partnering
4. How Does NPI Change the Way USAID Does Business?
5. NPI Strategic Framework and Performance Measurement
6. The NPI Building Blocks: Local Capacity Building, Strengthening the Enabling Environment, and Fostering Strategic Partnering
7. Lessons Learned: The Field Experience
8. Next Steps

II. Performance Measurement

1. Introduction
2. Strategic Framework
3. Performance Indicators
4. Conclusions/Next Steps
5. Guinea Case Study
1. Attachment A: USAID Guinea, NPI Questionnaire
2. Attachment B: Partnership Web Maps -- sorry, electronic version not available

III. Local Capacity Building

1. Introduction
2. Definitions, Parameters and Key Elements
3. Strengthening Organizations and Partnerships for NPI
4. Assessing Organizational Capacity
5. Capacity Building Tools
6. Innovative Approaches to Capacity Building in USAID
7. Lessons from the Leading Edge and Partner Missions
8. Conclusion: Framing Principles of NPI Capacity Building

IV. Strengthening the Enabling Environment

1. Definition and Parameters
2. Requirements of an Enabling Environment for the Three NPI Sectors
3. Practical Steps for Strengthening the Enabling Environment
4. Lessons Learned as Reported by LEMs and Partner Missions
5. LEM and Partner Mission Case Studies and Activities
6. Conclusion

V. Fostering Strategic Partnering

1. Introduction
2. Definitions and Key Concepts
3. The Context
4. Practical Steps for Fostering ISPs
5. Fostering Transnational Partnerships
6. Donor Roles in Fostering Partnerships
7. Lessons Learned by the LEM and Partner Missions
8. Promising Practices
9. Conclusions and Next Steps

VI. Special Reports

1. The NPI Process: Piloting NPI in the Learning Phase
1. Table 1: NPI Learning Team Members
2. Table 2: NPI Working Group Members
3. Table 3: NPI Steering Committee Members
4. Table 4: List of Briefings/Consultations with External Partners
5. Table 5: List of NPI Briefings/Consultations with USAID Personnel
2. Local Development and Local Partnership Initiatives in the Development Community: USAID's New Partnerships Initiative (David Valenzuela)
3. Defining the State of the Art: USAID's New Partnerships Initiative (Leslie Fox)

VII. Synthesis Report Annexes

1. Donor Roles in Fostering Partnerships
2. Relevant Agency Policy
3. Statistical Information for all Leading Edge and Partner Missions
4. NPI Missions' Strategic Objectives
5. Guide to the Lessons Learned from 15 Mission Reports

VOLUME II

I. NPI Leading Edge and Partner Mission Reports[download all missions]

1. Leading Edge Missions:
1. Bangladesh
2. Bulgaria
3. Guinea
4. Haiti
5. Kenya
6. Philippines
7. Sri Lanka
8. Zambia
2. Partner Missions:
1. Ecuador
2. Indonesia
3. Madagascar
4. Panama
5. Romania
6. Russia
7. South Africa

II. Resource Guide Annexes

1. Leading Edge Mission Specific Indicators/Candidate Indicators (Performance Measurement, Chapter 2)

2. Report to Mission--Guinea Mission NPI Strategies and Indicators (Building Local Capacity, Chapter 3) -- sorry, electronic version not available
3. Bibliography of Collected Printed Resources on Capacity Building and Partnership Formation
4. PACT Capacity Assessment Questionnaire Materials
5. Capacity Assessment Tool
6. Strategic Planning Checklist
7. Total Quality Management
8. Enabling Environment Bibliography (Creating An Enabling Environment, Chapter 4)
9. Reengineering Resource Materials
10. IGI International Case Study
11. USAID/Philippines Annexes - sorry, electronic version not available
12. USAID/Haiti Annexes - sorry, electronic version not available
13. USAID/Russia Annexes - included in Russia Mission Report above

---

NPI EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

USAID's New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) was launched by Vice President Albert Gore in March 1995 at the World Summit for Social Development. NPI is an integrated approach to sustainable development that uses strategic partnering and the active engagement of civil society, the business community, and institutions of democratic local governance to bolster the ability of local communities to play a lead role in their own development. Following a three month participatory design process, the NPI Core Report was released in July 1995. Between March and October 1996, NPI was piloted in fifteen USAID Missions. The NPI Resource Guide brings together the results of this period of field testing and provides a number of programming tools to assist with the incorporation of NPI into Mission portfolios.

NPI is a tool for development practitioners confronted with the following challenges: How to foster, nurture and sustain partnerships among groups which have often been antagonistic toward one another? How to build cooperation among diverse government agencies and nongovernmental actors at the transnational, national, regional, and local levels? How to foster efforts that facilitate participation by the business community in the development process, contributing solutions and resources to community problem-solving? How to strengthen civil society's contribution to sustainable development? How to respond to local initiatives aimed at breaking the cycle of dependence on development assistance? How to foster enabling environments that support local community involvement? How to transfer the necessary skills to provide partners with the capacity to define and execute initiatives to reduce poverty and promote economic, social and political development? How to institutionalize the society-to-society linkages critical to successful exit strategies?

The strategic opportunity addressed by NPI lies in tapping relatively underutilized development resources and energies at the community level. NPI proposes to do this by building strategic partnerships that foster sustainable development among three sets of key actors at the local level--civil society, institutions of democratic governance and the business community. Local empowerment--citizens working together to solve their own problems and build their own future--is at the heart of NPI. USAID's New Partnerships Initiative seeks to unleash the entrepreneurial talent and resources of communities to build new coalitions and to find new opportunities for growth.

NPI does not pretend to address the totality of the Agency's sustainable development efforts, but the NPI Resource Guide does provide tools that can enhance a broad range of programs across all of the Agency's Strategic Objectives (SOs). After review of the NPI Resource Guide by Senior Staff, the Agency will issue policy and program guidance, as appropriate.

Development practitioners have long understood the large untapped development resource represented by the knowledge, creativity, and resources of citizens in the communities of the developing world. Repeated attempts have been made to tap this wealth of development energy, but with limited success. Moreover, recent donor attention has been heavily focused on nation building and market reform. Insufficient attention to the critical role of the local community, however, will undermine efforts to promote development that can survive over the long-term. Based on the reports of the fifteen NPI participating Missions, the NPI Resource Guide serves to document and clarify local empowerment as a program option and to highlight the critical role of civil society in the development process. NPI demonstrates the strategic potential of the local community for advancing sustainable development across a broad range of development activities, in balance with nation building activities and market development.

Active participation in the design and field piloting of this USAID initiative on the part of a broad range of external partners--U.S. private voluntary organizations (PVOs), U.S. based and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), community based organizations (CBOs), people's organizations (POs), cooperative development organizations (CDOs), the business community, institutions of higher education, professional and trade associations, contractors, municipal officials, think tanks, foundations, host governments, and bilateral and multilateral donors--attests to widespread recognition of the development problem and program approaches outlined by NPI.

The March-October "NPI Learning Phase" has fulfilled its objective--to test and refine the development approach outlined in the NPI Core Report, and to develop programming tools that both reflect the Agency's best development practice and advance the state of the art. Across a wide range of development contexts, participating Missions have demonstrated that the three building blocks of NPI (reform of the enabling environment, local capacity building and fostering strategic partnerships) can significantly improve the ability of local actors to energize development. Finally, there is significant agreement among the participating Missions that NPI is a valuable tool to enhance reengineering.

IMPACT ON THE AGENCY

NPI is not intended to replace existing Mission Strategic Objectives. Rather it provides a conceptual framework and a strategic approach to partnering which can enhance existing Mission activities. Thus, NPI does not attempt to change Mission program priorities, but rather to use Mission resources more effectively in pursuit of those objectives. The NPI Resource Guide provides a number of programming tools for integrating NPI into Mission programs. The NPI Strategic Framework (see Chapter 2) outlines the relationship between local empowerment and strategic partnering engendered by NPI, and the success of the overall Agency mission of sustainable development.

USAID's internal management reforms, the changing role of development assistance in U.S. foreign policy, and declining resources all affect the way in which the Agency does business. NPI is a significant step in linking these dramatic changes to the substance of Agency programs. It suggests new ways of doing business that can guide USAID's response to these forces. Some of the program and operational implications, drawn from current and past field experience documented over the past year, are listed below.

1. Community Empowerment as an Assistance Strategy

USAID's commitment to local participation and ownership includes a commitment to community empowerment. The participating Missions have demonstrated that NPI supports assistance strategies that move beyond consultation with stakeholders and instead focus on the development of institutional arrangements. These arrangements help to ensure that stakeholders have standing, formalized participation in decisions, and strengthen their capacity to hold their own governments accountable. Thus, NPI links Agency requirements for engaging stakeholders, with a program commitment to community level democratization, decentralization, active civic participation and policy advocacy in all development sectors.

Not only have participating Missions commonly adopted a decentralization strategy in their programs, but they have also supported stakeholder efforts to systematically restructure the development roles of civil society, government and market institutions within the community. NPI urges Missions to look at the efficiency of alternative institutional arrangements for local development, and to address policy constraints and foster incentives with an impact on local initiative. For example, there is growing interest in the "privatization" of public functions at the local level in which a reoriented public sector facilitates business and civil society provision of local services.

2. NPI and Reengineering

The Mission reports attest to the complementarity between NPI and the Agency's reengineered management systems--enhancing the impact of the Mission's active involvement with local stakeholders and strengthening a results orientation both within USAID and among its development partners. First, NPI facilitates partnerships among stakeholders--precisely those actors with the strongest interest in assuring program results. Partnership requires clearly articulated agreement on: goals, the equitable distribution of costs and benefits, performance indicators and mechanisms to measure and monitor performance, the delineation of responsibilities, and a process for adjudicating disputes. These elements combine to institutionalize a Mission's results framework. Second, Missions report that they are better able to adapt to local conditions, leverage donor and local resources, and enhance program impact through these partnering arrangements. Third, the greater the organizational capacity of local organizations and partnerships, the better the public dialogue with USAID and other donors will be.

3. Cross-Sectoral Integration

Missions report that NPI provides them a means of breaking out of the stovepipes created by working within traditional technical divisions (without sufficient regard for spillover effects among the various sectors). The growing institutional isolation of sector specific Strategic Objectives within Missions has reinforced these stovepipes. Decentralization and community-level strategic partnerships, as program devices, encourage SO teams to look at common policy constraints, to support reinforcing institutional changes, and to see development results from the perspective of a community whose world is not organized on the basis of sectors. The Missions report new program initiatives and program synergies that have been realized through the formation of cross-SO NPI teams. Synergies appear among SO policy agendas. For example, democracy/governance SOs have benefitted from increased attention by other SOs to advocacy, governance issues and association building. Economic growth SOs have benefitted by greater attention on the part of D/G SO teams to the integration of the business community into civic life.

4. Cost Efficiencies

NPI provides an overarching framework and specific mechanisms for increasing program impact at a reduced program cost. NPI's concept of partnerships establishes USAID staff as entrepreneurs--bringing together other donors, local stakeholders, U.S. partners and the host government in a collective effort. The Mission role is to encourage institutional change and policy reform, and to provide technical services. The cost effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated in the NPI Leading Edge and Partner Mission case studies: (a) leveraging resources from other donors and local stakeholders; (b) using strategic partnering to build synergies across Mission SOs; (c) building local capacity and encouraging society-to-society exchanges that can survive USAID's departure; and (d) encouraging local ownership of programs. Adaptation to the diversity of local conditions has traditionally been a significant constraint on the impact of donor programs. NPI institutionalizes local ownership and responsibility for adapting to local conditions, thereby enhancing developmental impact.

5. Exit Strategies

NPI has a direct relationship to Agency exit strategies. Ideally, an exit strategy has two components: first, assuring that sufficient institutional capacity is left behind to sustain the contributions to development by USAID and its partners; and second, that society-to-society linkages facilitate continuing access to U.S. expertise and technology, and support long-term cooperation on issues of common concern (e.g., environment, disease control, trade, etc.). NPI addresses both of these objectives.

Over time, as a country moves closer to graduation, program emphasis may well shift from local capacity building to transnational partnering, as it has in USAID/Russia. Even where this is the case, however, the question of broad access to these linkages, their benefits and their sustainability require attention. With increasing globalization of U.S. interests, many organizations (e.g., universities, PVOs, trade associations, environmental NGOs, associations of mayors, cooperatives, etc.) have a stake in maintaining these relationships.

USING THE NPI RESOURCE GUIDE

The NPI Resource Guide provides technical advice on enhancing Mission results frameworks with NPI approaches, an assessment methodology for guiding local capacity building efforts, analytical work on key components of the national and local enabling environment, revisions of the conceptual framework of the NPI Core Report occasioned by field testing during the Learning Phase, case studies of relevant field experience, a detailed description of the way in which the participatory nature of the initial NPI design process evolved during the Learning Phase, bibliographies of important information resources, an analysis of the role of donors in fostering strategic partnering, a review of relevant policy and program guidance, and a set of proposed next steps. All of these components can serve as reference tools as the Agency begins to implement NPI generally. These materials have been developed by the NPI Learning Team, composed of fifteen NPI Leading Edge and Partner Missions and their local stakeholders, three Working Groups, participants from all USAID/W Bureaus, and a variety of external partners.

The Resource Guide is intended as a living document that can easily be transformed into a Web site, where existing resources can be supplemented with new case studies, a guide to technical resources, discussion groups, documentation of experience with NPI (e.g., program impact and cost efficiencies), and relevant experience from other donors.

Synthesis Report (Chapter 1)

The Synthesis Report outlines and reflects the evolving nature of the conceptual framework for NPI; details progress to date; explores issues relating to NPI's results framework and performance measurement; summarizes the primary lessons and recommendations to emerge from the working groups; distills the experiences of the NPI Leading Edge and Partner Missions during the NPI Learning Phase; and examines next steps. It is useful to Mission and Bureau management for orienting program design and reviews, and as background for discussions of NPI with external partners. This section also serves as a reference point and gateway to subsequent chapters.

Working Group Reports (Chapters 2-5)

Chapter 2, Performance Management, develops an inventory of Mission performance indicators relevant to NPI activities and proposes a generic NPI Strategic Framework that links NPI to the Agency's Strategic Plan. The NPI Strategic Framework was made available to all participating Missions, and was specifically field tested in Guinea (reported in Chapter 2). The field test demonstrated the utility of the Framework for clarifying causal relationships between NPI activities and Mission SOs, for overcoming stovepiping among Mission SOs, and as a programming tool for identifying potential partnerships and program activities. A number of Missions were developing Mission SOs and performance indicators during the Learning Phase and were able to build NPI principles into their consultations with their development partners. Panama, for example, invited external partners to join all of the Mission's SO teams.

Chapter 3, Local Capacity Building, provides a brief review of the state of the art in organizational capacity building--both conceptually and operationally. The NPI Learning Phase elicited numerous field examples of best practice in organizational capacity building that can inform Agency managers. A major contribution of this Chapter is that it adapts organizational capacity analysis to NPI's three sectors (civil society, business, and institutions of democratic local governance) and, additionally, provides innovative sections on strengthening the capacity of intra-sectoral, inter-sectoral and transnational partnerships among organizations. The Chapter also discusses the importance and organizational requirements of vertical linkages. This vertical dimension permits Missions to aggregate individual organizational problems at the local level in order to identify broader institutional or policy constraints--facilitating intervention at multiple levels. The Chapter provides a set of tools for program development--selection of organizational partners, organizational capacity assessment, a strategic planning checklist, and decision-making matrixes for both training and technical assistance. These tools will be useful throughout Mission portfolios for identifying organizational and institutional constraints.

Chapter 4, Strengthening the Enabling Environment, provides a brief description of the key policy conditions for encouraging the vigorous development of each NPI sector and adds a section on characteristics of the enabling environment for cross-sectoral partnering--a new area for policy analysis. The five key components of a supportive enabling environment include: decentralization, democratization at the local level, freedom of and access to information, competitive markets and a sound macro-economic policy environment, and a minimum threshold level of social accord. The Working Group provides a particularly useful set of principles for guiding institutional design for cross-sectoral cooperation. The Chapter also provides operational guidance for strengthening the enabling environment--emphasizing that several sectoral policy environments interact in supporting local initiative, and that the organizational capacity for national advocacy is a key component of local capacity building.

Chapter 5, Fostering Strategic Partnering, is an innovative report on building capacity for inter-sectoral partnering (among institutions of democratic local governance, civil society, and business). In addition to emphasizing the unique problems of building organizational structures and agreements among three sectors which have different values, incentives and rules of accountability, the Chapter provides a practical guide for fostering inter-sectoral partnering. Attention is given to facilitating dialogue, adjudicating conflict and defining common goals among diverse actors. Field experience clearly indicates that strong inter-sectoral partnerships take time and are staff intensive, but are well worth the investment. Special attention is given to transnational models of South-South and North-South partnerships.

Special Reports (Chapter 6)

There are three special reports included in the NPI Resource Guide (Volume 1, Chapter 6). The first includes a detailed description of the way in which the participatory nature of the initial NPI design process (as detailed in Annex 3 of the original Core Report of the New Partnerships Initiative) evolved during the Learning Phase (Special Report 1). In this sense, the NPI Resource Guide itself is a good example of the results to be achieved th rough strategic partnering.

Second, there are two reports detailing the context within which NPI is evolving and highlighting similar activities and conceptual frameworks emerging among other bilateral and multilateral donors, and within the academic, think tank and foundation co mmunities (Special Reports 2 and 3).

Synthesis Report Annexes (Chapter 7)

There are five annexes to the Synthesis Report: (1) an overview of donor roles in fostering partnerships; (2) a list of relevant Agency policy and program guidance; (3) general statistical information for all of the Leading Edge and Partner Miss ions; (4) a list of each of the NPI Mission's strategic objectives; and (5) a guide to the lessons learned from Mission reports.

Lessons From the Field (Volume 2, Section A)

The full reports of the NPI Leading Edge and Partner Missions contain a wealth of case studies from the field concerning Mission management constraints and arrangements for integrating NPI into Mission results packages and reengineering's participatory management approaches. Examples are also provided from every component of the Agency's Strategic Framework and include models of institutional arrangements and management practices that can improve local ownership, foster local initiative and enhance the sustainable impact of Agency development activities. The reports from the NPI pilot missions document lessons learned during the NPI Learning Phase, which are further analyzed on a region-by-region basis in the Synthesis Report.

Annexes to the NPI Resource Guide (Volume 2, Section B)

The annexes to the NPI Resource Guide include: additional NPI resource material (such as bibliographic resources); selected annexes from the Working Groups and Leading Edge and Partner Missions; and additional models and NPI-related input from several of USAID's external partners with experience in the area of strategic partnering.

[Top of Page]