From the Community Toolbox: An Audience-Friendly, Visual Approach to Collaborative Learning and Adapting (CLA)
By: Meredith Brown, Adaptive Management Specialist, IDEAL
Have you ever walked through a market, stopping at eye-catching stalls in order to chat with the vendors and look at various items to learn more about their goods and services? Have you ever participated in a science fair, interacting with teams as they used props and posters to share learning from their research? In either of these situations, you likely enjoyed how easy it was to talk, share, ask questions, and learn, diving in deeper with some vendors or circling back to learn more from a particularly interesting experience or experiment. If that is the case, you might be excited to know that this approach can be used to highlight and share program results and learning.
There are many standard ways to share information, project findings, and learning, such as publishing reports or hosting webinars. Program staff may also consider using a more engaging and interactive visual approach, like USAID Nawiri’s Market Stall Activity, to facilitate processes of collaborative reflection, knowledge/ experience exchange, constructive interrogation, learning, and adaptation (CLA). The Market Stall Activity creates a dynamic, fun, and safe environment to gather and present challenges, lessons learned, and successes through attractive, audience-friendly visuals and highly interactive team presentations.
What is a Market Stall Activity?
For a major complex program or consortium Learning Event involving diverse program teams, several groups or teams create “market stalls” in a large conference room or gathering space, containing visual representations of their work — field photos, maps, pictures, drawings, M&E data charts, and props or supplies. Each market stall includes a wall space or board of photos and space for visual artifacts to support the team’s verbal presentation and Q&A sessions. Mixed participant groups of “visitors” (project colleagues, peers, and/ or partners) then rotate through the space during different rounds of the activity, allowing for focused discussion, critical reflection, Q&A, and dialogue at each stall. Each team will split up, so a few team members rotate around the stalls, while others stay at their “home stall” co-facilitating the sessions, spending approximately 60–90 minutes at each stall.
Why and How Did Nawiri Pilot This and How Can You?
Within USAID Nawiri, their notably complex, adaptive multi-sectoral RFSA program makes having meaningful CLA a challenge. There tend to be ever-competing demands, not enough time, and a lack of safe spaces for deeper collective reflection, constructive self/peer interrogation, ideas sharing, and learning. Therefore, their annual learning events (ALEs) have consciously aimed to create dynamic, stimulating, and enabling environments for exactly that, actively engaging field staff and representatives of all core consortium teams and key partners, among others.
At the USAID Nawiri consortium’s 2023 Annual Learning Event, multi-sectoral teams and technical specialists spent three days engaged in collective reflection, constructive interrogation, and collaborative learning through this highly visual and interactive market stall approach. Participants included all levels of consortium staff, county, and sub-county government officials, USAID Nawiri technical team leads, and select others. No PowerPoints were allowed! A county government official stated, “I have attended so many workshops on livelihoods and gender, but I never got a practical feel of activities in the field as I did yesterday!”
The movement through the stalls and conversations that occurred gave valuable real-time feedback to teams in a fun and informative way, as well as to highlight promising ways forward, including reinforcing consortium-wide CLA through enhanced Sequencing, Layering, and Integration (SLI), both internally and more widely. Unlike most presentational/PowerPoint-centered forums, the market stall sessions are extremely engaging, witnessing rare degrees of team preparation and dedication, excited participation, heated debates, and cross-team questioning, while also showcasing significant program adaptations and better ways forward. A Nawiri staff member shared, “I enjoyed getting an in-depth understanding of the work of the other sectors, also being able to self-critique and analyze your own strategies from the gaps that have been identified by other staff.”
This learning event was successful for reasons including the guided preparation ahead of time, the safe space created for ideas sharing, and genuine CLA, as well as the enthusiasm of diverse participating teams. If you are interested in holding a Market Stall Activity within your own team or activity, you can download and adapt this prep guide as a resource to explore presentation guiding questions, format, and rationale.
Do you have a tool to share with the FSN Network community? We love spreadsheets (and Word docs, etc.)! Send them to nhelme@acuteincite.com.
