The Global Delivery Initiative: A Partnership for doing development differently

On December 11 and 12, 2014 over 40 other participants, from around 30 different organizations joined the Global Delivery Initiative in Berlin. The event was jointly hosted by GIZ and the World Bank.

The Global Delivery Initiative is an inspiring and ambitious collaboration across the international development community at a new frontier: improving the outcomes by leveraging delivery know-how.

Participants were from the public and private sectors, research communities, and civil society, coming from Africa, Europe, Asia, as well as North and South America. This included IADB and AfDB, DFID, USAID, Harvard University, the Overseas Development Institute and the Gates Foundation - a diverse group.

What we are all aspiring to do is to get better at understanding and operationalizing what works in our interventions, under what conditions, and – above all – how.

How can we ensure, for example, that when schools are built, children will learn? That when our clients construct clinics, people’s health improves? How can we ensure that the reforms we help design will lead to real changes, felt by citizens?

Numerous organizations have tried to tackle these questions. Considerable work around delivery has already been done, including at a workshop in Seoul last year (“Towards a Science of Delivery for Development: Setting the Agenda”) sponsored by the World Bank Group and Korea Development Institute.

At this stage, the Global Delivery Initiative is looking to develop an evidence base of delivery know-how: a science of delivery for development. It will draw on the experiences of implementers across countries and regions in all development sectors, combining “what” they do with the right delivery “how.”

To that end, in Berlin the group made commitments to:

• Launch the Global Library of Delivery Case Studies with contribution from all Global Delivery Initiative partners in 2015. This online, publically accessible collection will make crucial contributions to our knowledge of complex delivery processes and will benefit practitioners by helping them to make more informed decisions and deal with complex delivery challenges.
• Rethink project cycles to allow for feedback loops and mid-course corrections. We will work with these organizations to identify how all involved can do business more effectively and combine technical expertise with on-the-ground delivery know-how. This includes USAID, GIZ, and DFID.
• Conduct research into the recurring delivery challenges. This research will draw on the depth and breadth of experience of all partners to identify analytical categories of common and recurrent delivery challenges, and deploy insights from this research to support operations.
• Collaborate on knowledge-sharing. All the partners gathered in Berlin have important expertise on how to disseminate and use delivery know-how. We will gather these diverse experiences to make sure that we are learning better from each other.

The follow-up event of the Global Delivery Initiative will take in the first half of 2015 place in a partner country, primarily addressing partner organizations and clients.

If you want to know more and get involved, we invite you to get in touch with us.

For GDI: Arno de Vanssay, European Commission (Arnaud.DE-VANSSAY@ec.europa.eu)

For GDI: Maria Gonzalez de Asis, World Bank (mgonzalezasis@worldbank.org)

For the Global Library of Delivery Case Studies Oliver Haas, World Bank (ohaas@worldbank.org)

For research: Daniel Ortega Nieto, World Bank (dorteganieto@worldbank.org)

For knowledge-sharing: Thom Sinclair, USAID (thsinclair@usaid.gov)

Check out our Voices & Views: From Science of Delivery to Doing Development Differently