“Inspiring Change”

A sharing & learning event for African facilitators of multi-actor collaboration and change processes

4-6 October 2010 – Nairobi KenyaOrganised by The Change Alliance with SNV Eastand Southern Africa

Introduction

Development organisations are increasingly turning tovarious forms of multi-actor collaboration to leveragechange. Through new alliances and partnerships, oftenwith business and government, these organisations seekto scale up impact and inspire deeper forms of social,economic and political transformation.Facilitators play a key role in these processes. Yet manyorganisations struggle to find experienced facilitatorswho can help guide longer-term processes of change inwhat are generally complex and difficult settings.Facilitators themselves lack peer support andprofessional networks, and are starting to voice theirneed for greater professional recognition of the ‘scienceand art’ of guiding multi-actor change processes.The ‘Inspiring Change’ event aims to share and collatestate-of-the-art experiences and explore ways of supporting and strengthening capacity for effectivefacilitation of multi-actor processes. Organised by theChange Alliance and SNV, the event will bring together agroup of experienced process facilitators from acrossAfrica with development organisation leaders andinterested donors.The event offers the opportunity to share

inspiring

experiences of multi-actor change, which will hopefully

inspire

participants to try out and support these changeprocesses.The event responds to a need expressed by differentmembers of the Change Alliance. It has also met with apositive response from development organisations andfacilitators, as it links up with current strategies in thesector.

The challenge: leveraging impact in acomplex world

It has become widely recognised that dialogue andcooperation between different stakeholders, and acrossdifferent scales, is critical.The world is becoming more complex than ever before, asare the challenges we now face. We need innovativesolutions to reverse persisting poverty and unsustainable useof our natural and human resources. Only when diversestakeholders are able to meet, share experiences, learntogether and contribute to decisions will innovative solutionsevolve.Many development organisations and networks have becomeaware that these change processes are of an increasingly‘emergent’ nature, and need to be facilitated. Across Africawe find examples of multi-stakeholder processes: in naturalresource management (e.g. sustainable land use change,reforestation, co-management), in value chain development(e.g. pro-poor chains, commodity platforms), in education(e.g. district education platforms) and in health care (e.g.HIV/AIDS coalitions.Facilitating these processes goes beyond organisinginteractive events or ‘workshop facilitation’ – it is about thedesign and facilitation of long-term, systems changeprocesses. These approaches raise a number of challengesand questions:-

What are the roles of the convening or initiatingorganisations (often donors)?-

How can we bring on board a diverse group of stakeholders, especially the private sector?-