Designing & Facilitating Collaborative Learning Networks: A Toolkit

HOW YOU CAN USE THIS RESOURCE: This toolkit is intended for anyone who manages, facilitates, supports, or seeks to create opportunities for Collaborative Learning across coalitions, groups, and other stakeholders or who is interested in starting a Collaborative Learning Network. It explains what Collaborative Learning is, why it’s an effective approach to support locally led development and systems strengthening and provides the 10 essential ingredients for successful Collaborative Learning Networks.

OVERVIEW:  This toolkit synthesizes lessons, tips, and tools accumulated from more than a decade of experience designing and facilitating over 20 Collaborative Learning Networks.

Collaborative Learning — an approach which brings together people who face common challenges to share knowledge and jointly problem-solve — is a powerful way to support locally led development and achieve impact. It provides a structured process in which change agents determine priorities, set the learning agenda, work together to identify strategies to address complex challenges, and provide ongoing implementation support to one another. Collaborative Learning — unlike traditional approaches to technical assistance — centers the expertise of local change agents and captures the valuable tacit knowledge of practitioners to advance systems change.

This interactive resource will introduce you to collaborative learning; explain how it can support locally-led initiatives and development; outline the theory of change; and provide practical knowledge on how to design, facilitate, and measure collaborative learning networks. It also outlines the limitations of collaborative learning and includes additional resources for different stakeholders.

Publishing Organization: Results for Development