Learning

We aim to open up and transform public procurement to deliver measurably fairer and better results for people around the world. We’re achieving this big ambition with our small team, and we believe that our success is thanks to embedding learning into the core of how we operate.

How we are learning Our rapid reflections

Our approach

We are constantly reflecting on if our activities are helping us achieve the change we want to see. Likewise, we help our partners ask themselves these questions, too. This approach has helped us to stay nimble and pivot when it makes sense, as well as quickly double down on what works to achieve impact.

Our organizational learning tactics include:

Clear and meaningful organizational strategy with targets. Our strategy, which includes our theory of change, guides our day-to-day work. We have measurable public targets that we pursue, the most important of which are our impact and progress targets. We set the bar high and are striving for measurable outcome changes. We regularly revisit and refresh our strategy to ensure it stays relevant and useful.
Rapid reflection meetings. On a quarterly basis, our entire team comes together to review our strategy targets and reflect on what is going well, what is going less well, and where we need to change our approach. Review our quarterly notes.
Project impact and reviews. For each major project, we articulate a theory of change that we refresh regularly. We also develop a monitoring and evaluation framework for these projects, and measure the project impact along the way. We regularly hold internal check-ins to review progress, discuss challenges, and how might better support our partners.
Sharing learning with the community. Learning and capacity building for and with the community is deeply embedded in our organizational strategy. We are fostering a community of changemakers who we hope will promote open contracting without OCP. This means investing a lot in developing and sharing learning resources with and from the community. Check out our pages Learn, How to implement open contracting, and our Blog.
Annual report. Each year we openly reflect on what has gone well and not so well in the past year and summarize these reflections in our Annual Report. We particularly like to share where we got stuck or failed, because that is how we learn.

Our project learning tactics include:

Goal setting and project planning: We help our partners articulate clear goals, and create strong, logically coherent project plans, otherwise known as their theory of change, which tie their activities with the outputs, outcomes, and impact that they want to achieve. We encourage our partners to involve beneficiaries and other key stakeholders in this early design phase, and moving forward.
KPIs: We assist our partners with establishing and regularly measuring these goals through useful and feasible KPIs and data collection. We particularly care about measuring the benefits that open contracting combined with other reforms can bring to marginalized communities and entire systems.