ODI’s research on innovating and adapting within the SWIFT programme

Nathaniel Mason is a Senior Research Fellow at ODI. He has been involved in the SWIFT programme ever since the proposal development stage. He now oversees the operational learning of the programme and has represented ODI within the consortium’s steering committee. He is currently working on a piece of research around the theme of innovation and adaptation.

Reasons behind the research

There are two main reasons why we chose to conduct research on the topic of innovating and adapting within the SWIFT programme.

The first reason is to find out how the implementing partners can better support local staff to solve problems, particularly when working under quite new, challenging and very time-pressured programmes such as SWIFT. We are looking to find how to empower teams in country to adapt and change what they are doing according to the needs that arise.

The second reason is to try and bring some of the learnings of the SWIFT programme to the wider sector, looking at whether Payments by Results programming, as well as how such programmes are managed, can incentivize innovative, adaptive ways of working.

Unexpected answers

There were a few respondents, mainly from the global level that said that there wasn’t really anything innovative about SWIFT. In a way that reflected the nature of the programme and the risks involved with payment by results. If you must hit a certain number of beneficiaries, it makes sense to do what you know works well.

But interestingly enough, quite a high number of staff working in Kenya and DRC felt that they were solving problems and getting better results by doing things differently. Approaches that are quite well known in the sector maybe felt new to the people implementing them in the field. There is a lot of debate about what really counts as innovation – or even whether there was a conscious approach to promoting more adaptive ways of working, which we will discuss in the report.

Face-to-face interviews

After the online surveys, we carried out interviews face to face. We wanted them to be done in country by staff who had been involved in the program, which obviously poses some risks because it reduces independence. But it was part of a wider framing of this whole piece of work. It was not about establishing a kind of objective truth about innovation and what was innovative, but more of an internal reflection helping the people who had actually done the program take a step back and have a moment to think about what works and what could be done differently next time.

Things that came up as enablers of innovation tended to be about the human side of the programme – how people interacted with their peers, managers and a wider network, for example a management style that allowed people to take risks. There was less emphasis on the programme design or hard constraints like budget. A couple of people reflected on the payment by results modality as being helpful, because in comparison to a grant contract, the teams could reallocate the budget to different activities without having to agree with the donor first, as long as they thought it was going to achieve the outputs and the outcomes.

Final publication

The next stage of the research is to finish the analysis of the interviews. We enter the transcripts into a software that helps us analyse the information and pull out the themes that are coming up consistently. We will then write that up into a document. We will aim to have recommendations, and not just facts and figures, for other organisations attempting to do innovation or work more adaptively and empower staff on the ground.

Nathaniel Mason