This collaboration between IDS and the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) aims to bring appropriate participatory methods into quality assurance within SDC. It will also bring new levels of rigour to the principles of participation, poverty orientation and empowerment in the work of SDC and its partners.
Goal and Theory of Change
People who are impoverished or disempowered have insights and powers that are vital to our understanding and to our acting together on the political, cultural and economic conditions that keep them in poverty. When development agencies have found fitting ways to place these insights and capacities at the heart of their operational decisions, they have secured more effective development interventions and better results in terms of sustainable reductionin levels of poverty. This is an area of common interest between the IDS researchers and the Quality Assurance – Poverty team at SDC, and we are both concerned with methods that are true to participatory understandings and effective in improving interventions. This collaborative programme will meet our common goals and allow each of us to enhance the progress of the other.
Purpose
Within a period of three years our collaboration will result in the active use by SDC and its partners (implementing partners, government and civil society organisations) and IDS and its partners and networks (civilsociety and development organisations in both the north and south) of effective methods and approaches for participatory learning and development practice. The methods aim to draw in perspectives given by poor people, as well as those of officials, leaders and practitioners. We will seek change in three spheres:
- projects/programmes
- domains of country strategies
- broader international development community (specifically, the partners and networks with whom the IDS researchers collaborates and influences)
Not only will this collaboration bring appropriate participatory methods into quality assurance, but it will also bring new levels of rigour to the principles of participation, poverty orientation and empowerment in the work of SDC and its partners
Key contacts
