The completion of the SuSanA Phase 3 BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

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Re: Fwd: [SuSanA Forum] The completion of the SuSanA Phase 3 BMGF Grant - building on the results in future? (Announcements regarding SuSanA)

Hi Neil
Yes the key issues are listed in the the three bullets touching on organization and operations. The BMGF support to SuSanA through SEI goes back to 2012 just after the Forum got started. We have seen significant strides in growth and content over those years. With the intensive two years of work since 2016, SuSanA now has the tools and strategies in order to move forward. This will require dynamic leadership and new shared partnerships in order to create a new governance, funding and ownership structure. Creating a non-partisan Task Force to hammer out these details is the next step. Yes more resources will be needed but first the current advisory body, the SuSanA Core Group, needs to initiate the reorganization process.

Regarding your question surrounding consensus - there is agreement within the Core Group that organizational and operational improvements are necessary. But exactly what sort of organization and governance structure has not been agreed to. This is where the Task Force work will need to come in. Funding the Task Force is the current task at hand.
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Arno Rosemarin PhD
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Re: Fwd: [SuSanA Forum] The completion of the SuSanA Phase 3 BMGF Grant - building on the results in future? (Announcements regarding SuSanA)

Many thanks Elisabeth,

From this communication, if I understand correctly, the key issue is to do with SuSanA's organisational structure and governance?

Is there now a consensus among all parties on how SuSanA's organisational structure and governance should be? If so, what is the consensus view?

Any transition needs more resources, not fewer, for the organisation to evolve into a new steady state. Given that the Gates Foundation has initiated this 'radical restructuring', are they not ethically obliged to support the transition? (Indeed, the huge potential role of communities of practice in international development is well recognised, and SuSanA's evolution is a valuable case study.)

One thing is very clear to me. SuSanA is a dynamic, successful community of practice in global sanitation and health. Such CoPs are rare. They should be treasured and nurtured.

Best wishes, Neil
Coordinator, Healthcare Information For All (www.hifa.org)
Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of the HIFA global health campaign (Healthcare Information For All - www.hifa.org ), a global community with more than 19,000 members in 177 countries, interacting on six global forums in four languages. Twitter: @hifa_org FB: facebook.com/HIFAdotORG This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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Re: Fwd: [SuSanA Forum] The completion of the SuSanA Phase 3 BMGF Grant - building on the results in future? (Announcements regarding SuSanA)

Hi Neil and all,

Arno reminded me that we do have an official e-mail about the reasons for the end of the grant one year earlier than originally planned, which we received in May. It was written jointly by Jan Willem Rosenboom (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and Arno Rosemarin (SEI). I have permission to share it here (copied below and the same text attached as a pdf file):

+++++++++++

From: Jan Willem Rosenboom
Sent: 6 May 2018 10:27
To: Jan Willem Rosenboom; Arno Rosemarin
Subject: Changes in the SuSanA support grant (OPP1152884)

Colleagues,

The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would like to share this joint message about changes to the project aimed at supporting and strengthening SuSanA.

This project got underway in October of 2016 and was aimed at helping the network position itself as a strategic and high-quality knowledge hub. As SuSanA is not a legal entity that can accept funding, the project grant was issued to SEI. In the first 18 months of the project, important diagnostic and analytical work was completed (among other things consisting of a market study and web platform user experience study) providing data and insights for a communications strategy and work plan.

A progress review meeting in October of 2017 confirmed the urgency of the challenge to SuSanA to effectively respond to demands from the sector as well as the enthusiasm and motivation of all involved to do so. However, at the same time it became clear that progress on change had been slower than planned, and that communication, clarity and accountability needed to be improved if the potential of the project were to be realized.

The partners (including SEI staff and consultants, SuSanA core group members, WaterAid and Oxfam) worked on addressing the issues identified in the October workshop, and a number of realizations emerged from that work:

  • Effectively engaging with the SuSanA network around questions of its focus, priorities and structure required a more effective way to directly engage, with clear lines of responsibility and accountability for decisions. This realization led to an organizational study receiving high priority;
  • Translating insights from the market study into website improvements, effectively targeting specific user groups required the engagement of a technology consultant able to move concepts into practice;
  • Adding additional priorities and activities to the work plan without improving organizational and operational clarity first would be counterproductive and did not have a high likelihood of success.

These insights resulted in the decision to drastically restructure the project. This restructuring took place in two dimensions:
First, going forward, the primary focus will be on completing the organizational study and technology recommendations while suspending other activities. Second, the new project end date was brought forward to September 30 of this year. In September, there will be a number of recommendations before SuSanA, in terms of its organization and operation. It is too early to predict what these will be -or to speculate which ones will be adopted and how fast. However, we all hope that the required clarity will result from the work to be completed in the next five months, enabling growing support for the network from a variety of sources from within the sector.

SEI and the Gates foundation both realize that this decision is a disappointment for many. Staff and consultants employed on the project are directly affected, and so are members and users of SuSanA who have invested their time and energy in contributing to the vision laid out by the project. The decision to implement this change was not made lightly or hastily. At the same time, we would like to stress that changing the project priorities and timeline is not a sign of failure or giving up; the next five months will create opportunities to think deeply and propose ways forward informed by past experience. We are hopeful that SuSanA will embrace those opportunities and emerges with an optimized governance structure and sustainable business model and funding strategy.

Sincerely,

Jan Willem Rosenboom
Arno Rosemarin

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Re: Fwd: [SuSanA Forum] The completion of the SuSanA Phase 3 BMGF Grant - building on the results in future? (Announcements regarding SuSanA)

You said:

"Luckily, the "real" discussions do still take place, so I think we still have a good balance."


Indeed, the discussion we are having now is testament to the value of communities of practice where everyone can contribute their views and perspectives around shared objectives.

Best wishes,
Neil
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Hi Kris,

Thanks for your brutally honest feedback. I see your point; I also don't like it when people use the forum just as a one-way announcement board instead of a discussion (sometimes I intervene in the background and a post gets modified or deleted). Luckily, the "real" discussions do still take place, so I think we still have a good balance.

In your response you only referred to the discussion forum. What about the rest of SuSanA? What do you think of that? Or would you say the forum is the only thing that counts for you.


Hi Arno,

You said:

I don't think we are at all back to where we were in 2012.


In my statement earlier where I had said:

Now we are back to where we were before 2012, i.e. there is the funding by GIZ/BMZ which is also awesome.

I was referring purely to the funding situation not to how much we know about all the different aspects surrounding SuSanA. We do know a heap more and are much better equipped to go forward. But we currently don't have another co-funding partner . That's what I meant with "back to the situation of before 2012 where there is "only" GIZ/BMZ funding and the rest is in-kind (in-kind is also good of course but has its limits in terms of level of ambition that can be achieved)."

Hope that clarifies things.

By the way, I have recently updated two SuSanA library entries so that we now have all the outputs from this BMGF grant in two convenient locations. Do check out what we have here:

Various authors (2018). Documents from the SuSanA BMGF Grant led by SEI (Phases 1 to 3, 2012 to 2018) - Various documents on results from research grant. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
www.susana.org/en/knowledge-hub/resource...library/details/2042

And:
SuSanA (2017). Communications Plan of SuSanA. Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, Eschborn, Germany
www.susana.org/en/knowledge-hub/resource...library/details/3492

We'll also add more next month, i.e. some of the appendices accompanying the final report for this project.

Regards,
Elisabeth
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Neil/Elisabeth and others
Just to add a few further points of clarification.
The Seattle meeting at BMGF in Oct 2017 actually did not at all decide to reduce the SuSanA support project to 2 years. It led to a six month action to revise SuSanA's overall strategy and provide a business model - which we did very well I thought. It was after the production of the strategy document and workplan at the onset of tackling SuSanA's organisation and governance that the decision was made by BMGF to stop after two years of funding. Part of the reason for stopping the project was the lack of positive signals from the SuSanA Core Group and even the Secretariat to want to see organisational change quickly. But there may have been other internal pressures within BMGF that funding of external KM platforms was no longer a priority. The Sphaera work I believe created impetus for change and resulted in the resolution among the Core Group in August 2018 that organizational and governance change is a necessity. It is now a question of leadership to see that this happens.

I don't think we are at all back to where we were in 2012. There is now* a comprehensive strategy, business model, communications plan, market study, a 10 times increase in membership (now over 10000) forum.susana.org/forum/statistics - ie a whole host of positive things have happened thanks to the BMGF support. The last yard is the most difficult and that requires time to improve the organization/governance and ownership/financing of SuSanA.
____________
*These documents are on the Forum:
forum.susana.org/10-announcements-regard...ults-in-future#25415

Regards
Arno Rosemarin PhD
Stockholm Environment Institute
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  • JKMakowka
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Thanks for providing some further background. As the consultants wrote in their report, there is a risk of the donors appearing to be "bullies" and I think the BMGF is quite proud to be not a typical slow-moving institutional donor... so yeah let's not take it personal. Mostly just a mismatch of institutional style and expectations.

muench wrote: Kris, I am curious about your statement:

I also feel that SuSanA (despite maybe basic numerical indicators telling a different story) is in the last 2-3 years not really improving but rather on what feels like a slow decline.


Could you please explain this a bit more? Please be brutally honest! :ohmy:


Yeah, quite a few people are posting much less, but there are a few others that post more. And in the past this forum was certainly more "older white male" dominated, and those people (and me) were certainly a strong part of that.

Ok so to the brutally honest part: My impression is that SuSanA is more and more becoming an "announcement board" and not a "discussion board". Rarely are there any practical questions being asked anymore and many posts look a lot like cut&paste drive-by texts taken from some institutional announcement (which usually gather none of few replies). The authors of those also seem to be not actually interested in talking about what they posted and even when you make a maybe somewhat provocative response, you usually get at most a polite but evasive reply. Others topics are often so broad and non-committal, that I am often left wondering what exactly the purpose was of posting it in the first place (this even applies recent Thematic Discussions).

It might be part of a larger trend that forums have gone a bit out of style and have been replaced for many people by short text message forms such a Twitter or WhatsApp groups, but it is also a cultural change of this community that took place in the last few years.
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Many thanks for the clarification, Elisabeth.

This helps us to understand the situation and how we got here.

Best wishes, Neil
Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of the HIFA global health campaign (Healthcare Information For All - www.hifa.org ), a global community with more than 19,000 members in 177 countries, interacting on six global forums in four languages. Twitter: @hifa_org FB: facebook.com/HIFAdotORG This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

I copy here the project's planned outcomes for Phase 3 from the project documents:

The “Supporting SuSanA and broader Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Community of Practice through on-line platform” project aimed at improving SuSanA’s ability to improve the access to sanitation by improving the platform and increasing SuSanA’s reach to different sector practitioners through quality and targeted information by the right channels. The original project as outlined in the project document and the contract had three key outcomes including:

  1. Improved use of SuSanA Platform by identified target groups, through a clear communications plan and platform improvements.
  2. Demonstrable improvements in the impact that use of the SuSanA platform has on members' work in sanitation.
  3. Strengthened governance and institutional sustainability of SuSanA as reflected in an operational plan that includes a plan for funding the budget needed to assure the future of SuSanA.

The third outcome was only partially completed as some of it was meant to take place in Year 3.
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Hi Neil,

No, no, sorry, there are some things that you meddled up now. Let me try to explain quickly:

Sphaera is a consultancy firm based in the US. Here on their website you see their team: sphaera.world/#x-content-band-4
I copy from their website:

"We build systems to tackle wicked problems.
With expertise in digital strategy, financial product design, and software engineering, Sphaera occupies a unique position in the realm of world-positive technology companies. We conceptualise, design and develop legal, financial and technical infrastructure that supports connecting, collaborating and sharing resources across disparate organisations, networks and communities."


I think it's a very interesting company who does great work, I am sure (otherwise they wouldn't be in business!). One of their clients in the past has been BMGF, but I don't think they are "financially dependent" on BMGF. They have done two consultancies for them that I am aware of (this one and an earlier one unrelated to SuSanA).

So they are basically an independent consultancy firm who were tasked by BMGF to help SuSanA think options through.

Secondly, the main funding source for SuSanA has been since 2007 and will be for another 3 years the funding that GIZ channels into the secretariat staff, which they receive from the German federal ministry for economic cooperation and development (BMZ, see www.bmz.de/en/here ). Every three years they have to apply for more funding and they recently announced that they were successful for another 3 years of funding. This funding is for a program called "sustainable sanitation" at GIZ, and the SuSanA secretariat is a small part of that, amongst other things they do.

The project that we had with BMGF was a kind of co-funding arrangement which enabled some SuSanA-related activities to be taken to a higher level of ambition but it never was "core funding" for SuSanA. It actually started out as a small grant in 2012 (called "Phase 1 & 2") which only dealt with the discussion forum. At the time the aim was to help BMGF grantees to utilise the discussion forum to spread information about their projects. I did the community management work for that and interacted with hundreds of grantees over the years.

Two years ago the grant was made into something bigger (this is what we call Phase 3). This bigger structure was a consortium of Oxfam, WaterAid, GIZ and SEI, with SEI being in the lead. This project hat specific outputs and a results tracker framework and was designed for 3 years but had a built-in Go/NoGo decision point after one year: in October 2017. There was a big meeting in Seattle at that time and further deliberations which culminated in the decision to continue through Year 2 but not Year 3.

So I don't think it was all that bad. It doesn't mean that BMGF withdrew support for SuSanA. It just meant they ended that particular grant after two years instead of three. But they had been supporting the discussion forum (via me) and various other SuSanA-related activities since late 2012. I am super grateful for those years of co-funding by BMGF and don't want to develop a sour taste over the end of the Phase 3!

They did communicate to us the reasons for not continuing with Year 3 but it's not easy to put that into a few sentences. It had something to do with the frustration of the slow pace with which SuSanA was willing to be changed, I think. And the difficult, peculiar management structure of SuSanA (donut shaped, nobody "in charge" as such). In my mind, the reason was simply that they were dissatisfied with the performance of the consortium vis-à-vis the agree outputs. I'll copy the outputs into a further post (we are currently writing up the final report of this project; I will check with Arno if parts of it could be shared).

So please don't feel bad about BMGF withdrawing. I am rather grateful that they stuck with us for so long (late 2012 until now, that's six years) and enabled SuSanA to do all sorts of great things during that time. Now we are back to where we were before 2012, i.e. there is the funding by GIZ/BMZ which is also awesome. And maybe now is the time for other SuSanA partners to step into the gap and pick up the slack? That would be super awesome (hence our discussion about funding options for the forum moderation beyond January 2019 here ).

Some of the reports from the project's three phases are available here in the library (I am yet to add the more recent ones):
www.susana.org/en/knowledge-hub/resource...library/details/2042

Regards,
Elisabeth
Dr. Elisabeth von Muench
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Dear Elisabeth,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. As an ordinary SuSana member, and based on what I have read so far, I get the impression that the decision by BMGF to withdraw funding (without, apparently, any explanation?) together with the Sphaera Report have done more harm than good. The suggestion that "disruption was the aim" of the Sphaera report is troubling. I note that BMGF is one of the main partners of Sphaera (suggesting that Sphaera is at least partly financially dependent on BMGF).

I may of course be wrong and BMGF and Sphaera are genuinely trying to support SuSanA going forward. But it seems a very strange way to go about it. BMGF should provide a full and transparent statement to SuSanA members. They funded SuSanA over the past several years, they made the decision to stop funding one year early, they paid Sphaera to write a report (which seems to be of limited practical value, from what we hear). A statement from BMGF would be helpful to mitigate the negative impacts of these decisions and actions, explain why they have taken them, and provide positive, practical assistance to SuSanA over the coming months and years.

SuSanA is a rare example of a successful global community of practice, and deserves continued support and respect.

Best wishes, Neil
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Re: The completion of the SuSanA Phase III BMGF Grant - building on the results in future?

Hi Neil and Kris,

Thanks for continuing this very interesting discussion and for being so open and straightforward about it. I've decided to "stick my neck" out and also provide you with some honest thoughts from my end.

I had high hopes for the Sphaera consultancy. I thought they would be an excellent consultant for this task - as an outsider to SuSanA, even an outsider to the sanitation sector - to give us a fresh look at SuSanA and to help us take SuSanA from its loose network status which is reliant predominantly on funding by GIZ / BMZ (the additional funding by BMGF was a wonderful but always known to be time-limited exception) to something that could perhaps stand on its own feet, financially (if that's what we want).

The process of the consultancy was a little bit painful and not like I am used to dealing with consultants. I won't go into details here but suffice to say that it seemed a bit like: "disruption was the aim" (disruption is OK but there are still different ways of delivering that). In any case, it was still an interesting process to go through.

The report that we received in the end was quite interesting but in my mind lacked some clarity as to the way forward (and was also rather scant on the methods employed and reference points used, like Neal also pointed out above). I think it contains several useful ideas and it's good that they looked at SuSanA so critically. I'd rather we learn about all our flaws than get to read about what we do well already.*

However, several of their statements left me thinking "what exactly does this mean?" (Kris had referred to it as mumbo-jumbo in his post above). For example with regards to the website:

"The Information Architecture is crowded, confused, and unnecessarily complex”

What does this mean exactly? (I have attempted to get this clarified with the consultants but no reply yet).

And things like this (all in relationship with the website) left me more confused than anything:

Update market-facing website to a self-managed
content-management system, in order to provide
SuSanA with the capacity to more effectively
self-manage its online presence (Page 49)

OBSERVATIONS (Page 52)
As the front facing marketing, communications and business
development tool for SuSanA, the website fails on almost
every significant metric for effective digital design;
specifically:
● There is no human translated content that maps to
the primary site visitor browser languages (my comment: so they criticise that the website is only available in English? Aren't many other websites available only in English, too? How many other languages are we meant to translate it to? I think Google Translate does a decent enough job for many languages)
● The home page contains too much information, and
has no logical flow
● Homepage provides no information about SuSanA, or
the benefits of membership/partnership


Anyhow, the main purpose of the consultancy was to help us find a new organisational model for SuSanA that is less dependent on money from GIZ/BMZ and to help us work through the process. Hopefully we'll still get there but a bit slower than we thought.

We recently had a SuSanA core group call and this was how it was worded in the agenda:

SuSanA organisational development process

Updates on the following decision points from Stockholm:
Minutes from last Core Group Meeting (August 2018) here .

o Core Group agreed in August and is in full support that the process of organisational development should continue
o The Core Group further agreed that this should be done by using a sequential 10-step reorganization process (or some other method if appropriate) with the help of an external coach / consultant.
o Update on recent developments from Go5 respective Task Force funding proposal. A funding proposal has been developed and submitted to New Venture Fund by consortium members with the Go5. There are no funds available in 2018 and possibly not in 2019.
o Against this background the Secretariat at GIZ will finance a few days of consultancy [... to] advise the Go5 and the secretariat on how to design a future process aiming at change management for SuSanA.

(Go5 stands for Group of Five which is a group of 5 people who were selected to act as representatives for the core group in the SEI grant consortium; the core group itself is rather large now - about 50 people; the group of 5 are: Carol, Thilo, Roland, Claudia and Prit)

I think I am allowed to share this, as the minutes from each core group meeting are publicly available on the SuSanA website here:
www.susana.org/en/about/governance-structure/susana-core-group

Kris, I am curious about your statement:

I also feel that SuSanA (despite maybe basic numerical indicators telling a different story) is in the last 2-3 years not really improving but rather on what feels like a slow decline.


Could you please explain this a bit more? Please be brutally honest! :ohmy:

Regarding the forum and its numerical indicators they are here: forum.susana.org/forum/statistics

You can see that the "page actions" have plateaued at the same level as about 2014. Page visits have increased until January 2018 and are now constant at that same level. The number of forum posts has reduced compared to 2014/2015. The number of new SuSanA members is quite constant at about 150 new members per month.





My observation regarding the forum is that some of the very active contributors have disappeared or post only rarely now (e.g. Joe Turner, Mughal, Christopher Platzer). But the range of topics that we discuss has increased a lot, e.g. a lot more on behavior change, government initiatives in India, faecal sludge management policies, and perhaps less on UDDTs and reuse of excreta.

Apart from the forum, I find that there is a bit of a problem with the SuSanA working group structure. Working group members are not receiving enough targeted information on the topic of their working group and not being engaged enough in processes where they could involve themselves. The leads (for whatever reasons) are not "in our face" enough, apart for some few exceptions (the recent initiatives of WG 5 were interesting, see here ).

Regards,
Elisabeth


* Having said that, I got the sneaking suspicion that sometimes they swept "good" results under the carpet. E.g. there was this result from their small survey of SuSanA members (about 100 responses) which made SuSanA look rather positive but it was not mentioned in their report:

Dr. Elisabeth von Muench
Freelance consultant on environmental and climate projects
Located in Ulm, Germany
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
My Wikipedia user profile: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EMsmile
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