Policy LINK strengthens the leadership capacity of public, private, and civil society actors and fosters collective action among them to transform policy systems. Building on the successes of Africa Lead’s nearly decade of programming, Policy LINK does this through a range of core services, including:
Transformative leadership training.
Policy LINK offers a range of leadership training programs to develop the “soft skills” of public, private, and civil society actors, including a five-day Champions for Change course and a six-month executive leadership program as well as bespoke options.
Participatory stakeholder and network mapping to improve decision making and resource allocation.
Policy LINK uses a variety of participatory mapping techniques, both for systems and stakeholder mapping, to catalyze, scale and sustain organizational and institutional change.
Facilitation of a common vision and actions from all parties for a mutually beneficial solution.
Policy LINK uses a facilitative leadership approach and a set of resources to catalyze and strengthen multi-stakeholder coordination and inclusive dialogue among actors at all levels.
Joint work planning at local and community levels.
Policy LINK offers participatory tools and approaches to strengthen local systems to increase community and private sector participation in policy discussions, improve collaboration, communication, enhance the coherence of policy implementation, and ensure donors’ work aligns with and advances national, regional and other partnership goals.
USAID implementing partner coordination.
Where implementing partners are working in isolation, Policy LINK can apply USAID’s collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) methodology and get them to work together more efficiently and effectively.
Platforms for knowledge sharing and learning.
Through peer to peer networks, virtual and in person dialogue, and online learning and collaboration tools, Policy LINK facilitates global learning and knowledge management for policy.
As the USAID Bureau for Food Security transitions into the Bureau of Resilience and Food Security, various divisions of USAID are undergoing profound transformations. At the same time, resilience has become an integrative framework, requiring collaboration across institutional borders. It is in this context that partnerships have emerged as an important component of USAID’s resilience approach. The Partnership for Recovery and Resilience (PfRR) in South Sudan, which was recently named a resilience country, is one such partnership. PfRR is a deliberate effort to create a model of co-location, coordination, and collaboration among implementing partners, with a focus on strengthening community-level institutions for service delivery in light of South Sudan’s state fragility. In its role as a provider of backbone support to USAID/South Sudan for coordination on PfRR, Policy LINK will actively contribute to learning, with a focus on how best to track and measure resilience and engage communities, and will forge effective partnerships with donors, UN agencies, and other implementing partners.
This activity area focuses on providing backbone support to the Juba level partnership structures of the Partnership for Recovery & Resilience (PfRR), which includes the Technical Engagement Group (TEG), Steering Committee Taskforce, Steering Committee (SC), Donor Working Group (DWG), and the Joint Assessment, Measurement and Monitoring Group (JAMMG). The SC is the body of the PfRR that is responsible for policy making and vision setting. The SC brings together the highest-level decision makers from the partnering institutions within the PfRR.
This activity area focuses on establishing and advancing the foundational Building Blocks through CSO engagement, facilitating community mapping, facilitating community roadmaps and scorecards, supporting joint work planning, and supporting local community engagement with CFAs. The PfRR Partnership Framework articulates eight foundational Building Blocks, which are essential processes for fostering cooperation within local communities and between local and international stakeholders, donors, UN agencies and NGOs.
This activity area focuses on strengthening coordination in PAs and CFAs through leadership development and review of Implementing Partner joint work plans. One of the biggest challenges in the PfRR PAs has been the effective participation of local community stakeholders. In addition, USAID’s expansion to CFAs brings the same challenge of ensuring agency among local community stakeholders, providing a platform for voicing their aspirations, and empowering them to assume a leadership role in defining their needs and setting priorities and benchmarks.
