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Title
Please provide a name for your action learning plan.
Experimenting with portfolio approach through designing empowerment of women achievements and gender equality program
Challenge statement
Challenge type: If you are working on multiple challenges, please indicate if this is your "big bet" or "exploratory" challenge.
Please note: we ask you to only submit a maximum of 3 challenges - 1x Big Bet, 2x Exploratory. Each challenge must be submitted individually.
EXPLORATORY
Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)
Our challenge is how we might enable systemic change that accelerates the empowerment of women achievements of gender equality through a portfolio that leverage and connects UNDP’s experience, capabilities, resources and relationships.
Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?
UNDP Ethiopia CO conducted a portfolio review to improve the coherence of its programmes and ensure synergies across outcomes. The portfolio review recommended the country office adopt key measures for building synergies across the programme portfolio, avoid working in silos, maximize the utilization of in-house expertise and reduce duplication, and increase collaboration within and across units to augment programme management efficiency and effectiveness. Based on the portfolio review recommendations, the CO reconfigured its policy and programme management architecture to remain ‘fit-for-purpose’ as a key development partner and to substantially raise performance in terms the scale, quality, and impact.
Following the reconfiguration exercise, the CO embarked on a full rollout of a portfolio management approach within the framework of the CPD and to enhance cross-portfolio thinking and collaboration within the country office with the view to creating an open and innovative environment for effective policy, programmatic and operational solutions. The CO embarked to pilot the portfolio approach with one of the thematic areas that the CO prioritizes – gender equality and women empowerment. The GEWE portfolio is broad as mapping of outcomes and outputs are conducted for the whole GEWE work in the CO. Therefore, there is a need to take a narrower approach, and identify a more specific issue for the pilot within GEWE which is substantive and more concrete. Based on this, the GEWE portfolio will focus on women’s economic empowerment and livelihood recovery. Therefore, based on the identified issue, need to conduct a system mapping analysis on the selected GEWE area. The mapping conducted already will provide background information and need to be further narrowed down to the specific focus area.
Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.
A quick scanning of the CO ongoing projects and programmes shows that the CO interventions significantly integrated gender equality and women empowerment outcomes and outputs and are in full alignment with the priories of the CPD.
The GEWE-focused interventions are broadly categorized into six segments:
promoting women’s economic empowerment, and livelihood recovery including access to services, technology & inputs;
promoting women’s access to justice, rule of law & protection of rights;
women empowerment, leadership, and participation;
psychosocial support to women and girls’ survivors of SGBV;
institutional capacity building on gender mainstreaming & accountability; and
generation of data and evidence on GEWE for programme/policy design, monitoring and evaluation.
Qualitative evidence: What weak signals have you recently spotted that characterizes its urgency? Please provide qualitative information that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge. You can add text, a link, or a picture.
In 2021, portfolio performance reviews were conducted for the three programme units (CRES, GCPB and IET) with the objective of assessing the performance of the programmes, identifying successes and nailing down areas for improvement. In particular, it sought to establish the extent to which portfolio thinking was emerging and whether a collaborative culture was developing in upstream policy engagement, down-stream programmes /projects and operations, etc. The reviews provided opportunities for technical staff build team spirit, renew their commitment for taking coordinated actions to deliver results through efficient and effective implementation of annual workplans.
The CO embarked to pilot the portfolio approach with one of the thematic areas that the CO prioritizes – gender equality and women empowerment. In view of this, the CO is enrolled in the Portfolio Initiation Framework (PIF), a corporate investment framework for COs to design and operationalize portfolio approach. The PIF investment aims to build insights into the changes needed to accelerate the implementation of UNDP Strategic Plan 2022-2025 and supports the shift from projects to portfolios. The PIF investment supports COs to be able to formulate and implement their strategies for advancing context-specific portfolio approaches and a corporate support structure and seed-funding mechanism. The PIF is being piloted for six months (July’ 22- Feb’ 23) and is expected to generate learning and recommendations to operationalize portfolios as a standard way of working in UNDP at corporate level.
The CO has also been examining the design and application of the Portfolio Country Office Management System (POCOMAS) and how this is being applied in other country offices. In this regard, the CO has constructed a portfolio management share site with the guidance of the global office. The share site is a cloud-based tool that allows for a more effective remote work and collaboration. It helps project managers and partners to easily access critical project-related information even from remote work locations.
Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?
This portfolio testing strategy is premised on addressing the key constraints to addressing gender integration in Ethiopia CO by promoting system-wide integrated approaches across the CO programmes. The accelerator Lab plan to support the overall process starting from intent design to sensemaking and experimentation of the designed portfolio. While the portfolio will be led by us, it will engage implementing partners and stakeholders. To accelerate the impacts of our portfolio experiment, the facilitation of stronger open communication is needed. Building this as a consistent practice over the course of time is expected to shift the CO culture from one of the silos to one of more open communication.
Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?
How can we create a better connected and collaborative working environment by experimenting portfolio management approach within the community?
Partners
Who are your top 5 partners for this challenge? Please submit from MOST to LEAST important and state Name, Sector and a brief description of the (intended) collaboration.
Please state the name of the Parter:
Programmatic hubs
(i) Development Communications and Policy Advocacy Hub’
(ii) inclusive economic transformation unit.
(iii) climate resilience and the green economy unit and democratic governance and peacebuilding unit.] hub.
(iv) development and policy research hub,
(v) partnership development and result management hub
What sector does our partner belong to?
United Nations
Please provide a brief description of the collaboration.
The Accelerator lab is closely working with the portfolio core team and the global strategic innovation unit to roll out a pilot portfolio approach for six months as per the PIF guideline with the objective of experimenting with designing and implementing of the Portfolio of Interventions in the policy area of women empowerment and Gender equality as good development of a new set of competencies within the country office colleagues on systems thinking and system transformation and the portfolio approach.
Is this a new and unusual partner for UNDP?
No
Learning questions
Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?
1) Can portfolio management help break down of silos and build integration in the country office?
2) Can portfolio management support the engagement of donors and stakeholders for better delivery?
3) Can portfolio management create more space for learning and knowledge exchange between staff?
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Test, Grow
Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
Conduct a sensemaking session with stakeholders to build on a collective reflection by staff on how the current projects accelerate their efforts and further induce systems transformation to the selected portfolio thematic area. The sensemaking workshop will provide opportunities for identifying interventions to be interconnected under the GEWE portfolio to achieve the desired change. This exercise will enable the program team and stakeholders to reflect on their current portfolio of work focusing on gender equality and women empowerment, with the intention to maximize impact and effectiveness of their work. Once the portfolio profile is created, data from projects and programmes will be linked or migrated to the newly created portfolio. However, there is a system related challenge in terms of migrating data from projects/programmes to the newly portfolio profile. An offline template will be developed to manage the portfolio including resource monitoring. Develop operational planning for the implementation of the portfolio.
Then we will facilitate implementation, monitoring, and capturing learnings from the portfolio management exercise with a focus on the policy area of women empowerment and Gender equality. This involves positioning the gender offer into a distinctive value proposition that could be adequately communicated to donors, government, private sector, civil society partners among others.
Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
To the role we want to play through gender economic empowerment and equality, gender-disaggregated is essential and still a critical gap in the context we are working. Therefore, in many socioeconomic aspects such as gender-based pay gaps, decision-making roles assignment, policy constraints, etc. Therefore, the entire portfolio design process involved practical exercises on secondary data collections through desk reviews and in-person interviews. Such exercises will contribute to the gender-based data gaps, therefore informing our portfolio designing process.
Closing
Early leads to grow: Think about the possible grow phase for this challenge - who might benefit from your work on this challenge or who might be the champions in your country that you should inform or collaborate with early on to help you grow this challenge?
UNDP in Ethiopia has undergone organisational structural reconfiguration to function in a better connected and collaborative way as a development organisation in a continuously changing environment and to focus on delivering Country Programme results through efficient and effective utilisation of resources. The CO has thus undertaken a Portfolio approach to Programming which focuses on system-wide collaboration and partnerships among CO staff, partners and stakeholders. Therefore, learnings from this exercise will contribute to this CO effort.
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5Gender equality
8Decent work and economic growth
10Reduced innequalities
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