Learning

Learning within STAR Ghana Foundation looks at both outwards to other accountability work, and inward ensuring that lessons are learned and applied across the programme.

 

STAR Ghana Foundation draws on best practice and the latest research and contribute learning to the sector.

 

STAR Ghana Foundation nurtures and facilitates communities of practice and learning also known as clusters among grantees, partners and stakeholders in thematic clusters.

 

These communities of practice build an ongoing web of relationships and knowledge exchange between grantees, other citizen-based groups, government, communities and other key stakeholders. It also acts as a transmission system for improved policy and practice around transparency and accountability.

 

STAR will call on its partners, including grantees, to be more than implementers of projects or activities – it will support them to be brokers of knowledge, evidence, multi-stakeholder engagement and partnership. Through the communities of practice, STAR Ghana Foundation partners undertake collective action, exercise leadership in the process of collecting evidence, capturing learning, disseminating knowledge and scaling up innovations that can build more accountable, transparent policy and public services in Ghana to fuel wider scale change.

 

Critically, the communities of practice create ‘safe spaces’ in which the voices, experience and knowledge of all key stakeholders are engaged – a forum which particularly attends to the voices of women, girls and other vulnerable groups.

 

The Communities of Practice and learning also serve as space for collective action and movement building. This is achieved through joint uptake of demands with same policy actors; joint research and publication of evidence documents and representation at key national event that concern stakeholders. The clusters form the domain for communities of practice and learning for our thematic calls and promote joint learning within and across themes. 

 

The communities of practice also mobilise ‘action/reflection,’ evidence-based and experiential learning approaches, based on the assumption that much of the knowledge about the systemic challenges of poverty and inequality lies with the people and organizations engaged with these issues on the ground – and that among the most powerful vehicles for learning and capacity building are ‘learning through doing’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ learning.’

 

The communities of practice and learning, create a network of learning and action, which builds relationships of collaboration and trust between stakeholders required for collective action to solve problems. Linking in with the results framework, STAR Ghana Foundation deploys a range of collaborative methodologies to fuel the community of practice, including: System, stakeholder and power mapping; Policy and issue landscaping; Safe space dialogue and ‘deep listening’ to diverse stakeholder voices; ‘World Café’ dialogue; Story-telling; Peer consulting; Appreciative enquiry; Most Significant Change techniques; and Emergent Learning and collective action.

 

In addition, learning events are held thematic basis each year. These will build on successful approaches adopted under previous service contracts and the learning will feed into STAR-Ghana programming going forward.