Sharing the Journey as it Continues

The journey of adapting and scaling activities to end violence against children using the INSPIRE approach never really ends. With adaptation and scale up, you can always adapt better and scale up further. But even as the journey continues, a lot of progress is made. In this last module, we turn to the topic of sharing progress with partners and stakeholders to advance your scale-up strategy. By inviting others into the adaptation and scale-up process, the National Coordination Mechanism will benefit from new ideas, skills, and perspectives.

As with the Resource Team, bringing more colleagues and stakeholders into the process is also a way of promoting sustainability. The more people familiar with, and actively involved in, adaptation and scale up, the more likely it is that you will be able to increase the coverage of activities and sustain them over time.

Sharing Your Adaptation and Scale-Up Journey with Others

Event Tracking

As we saw in the Ending Violence Against Children Timeline in Module 1, it is important to document key events that influence adaptation and scale up of activities over time, both positively and negatively. Tracking these events offers a high-level view of scale up over time and provides information not found in other monitoring tools. It is useful to capture and report on events such as key meetings or political actions that affect, or are affected by, adaptation and scale-up processes and outcomes. It is also useful to share these events with others in the government, donors, and the global community.

Tool 5A is another tool for documenting, tracking, and analyzing key events that are most relevant to the current environment. We recommend that you first categorize events, then analyze them for potential scale-up opportunities and risks. This quick reflection combined with action-planning is a kind of adaptive management. As with other adaptive-management techniques, the National Coordination Mechanism will want to share their progress, as well as think about how to use the data to improve their leadership and learning.

Adapting in Response to Stakeholder Feedback

The National Coordination Mechanism + Resource Team should periodically ask others to help them reflect on the INSPIRE scale-up process and the systems-oriented approach which guided them to this point. One way to do this is by conducting individual or group interviews with a few key stakeholders (donors, policy makers, program managers). Tool 5B offers a guide for these discussions, as well as a resource to help the National Coordination Mechanism + Resource Team make sense of—and act on—what they learn from the conversations.

Pulling in the Same Direction: A Cross-Sectoral Review

As mentioned throughout this Guide, working across sectors is a distinctive aspect of the INSPIRE approach and should be considered at every step in adaptation and scale up. A critical role of the National Coordination Mechanism entails bringing Implementing Partners and other stakeholders from various sectors together to remind them of the interrelated nature of their activities and their common goals in ending violence against children. To do this, the National Coordination Mechanism + Resource Team should bring stakeholders together across sectors to:

1. Recognize common successes and challenges in adaptation and scale up.
2. Create processes that help those working in different sectors work toward goals that support each other, or “pull in the same direction.”
3. Help the National Coordination Mechanism + Resource Team create a common story about the action plan to end violence against children and present it as a strong, unified, and important area of government interest and donor investment.

Working across sectors is a distinctive aspect of the INSPIRE approach and should be considered at every step in adaptation and scale up.

These are critical objectives for INSPIRE, and cross-sectoral sharing is one of the most essential ways to meet these goals. This sharing cannot be accomplished using a single tool. It will require bringing stakeholders together to share results, perspectives, lessons, and best practices. This cross-sectoral review may be a single, day-long event or it may be a series of smaller meetings. Ideally, such a review can be twice a year. Reviews may be held at one national-level site; hosted regionally; or even happen through on-line conferencing, if necessary. A description of the “building blocks” needed for such a review is included in Tool 5C. Having the National Coordination Mechanism + Resource Team revisit or complete many of the tools in this Guide may be a helpful step in preparing for the review.