Leading Governance Innovation has been designed to help politicians and bureaucrats analyze their organizational needs, create a shared purpose around core values, and achieve results. The courses on governance innovation are for politicians and bureaucrats who intend to improve public service delivery for their constituencies or organizations. Our coaching team has provided coaching services to institutions such as the World Bank, GiZ, Ministry of Health, Melamchi Drinking Water Supply Development Board, and CTEVT. We currently incorporate the following frameworks into our courses on governance innovation:
Rapid Results Initiative
Rapid Results is a structured and strategic process that mobilizes teams to achieve tangible results within 100 days. It helps organizations to build on the outcomes of diagnostics (identified problem) and use learning of designed 100-days-projects to advance towards long-term goals. The process delivers tangible results and outcomes that matter to the goal of the organization and develops customized processes in order to do so. It empowers teams to set their own goals, actively pursue them, and builds capacity and confidence in the process. Following the process, teams will have addressed technical problems, as well as adaptive challenges.
Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation
Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) is developed by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock at Center for International Development at Harvard University. PDIA is based on four core principles. First, PDIA focuses on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting pre-conceived and packaged “best practice” solutions). Second, it seeks to create an ‘authorizing environment’ for decision-making that encourages ‘positive deviance’ and experimentation (as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them exactly as designed). Third, it embeds this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from ex-post “evaluation”). Fourth, it actively engages broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant and supportable (as opposed to a narrow set of external experts promoting the “top down” diffusion of innovation).
Our portfolio of courses on leading governance innovation are:
Daayitwa Nepal Public Service Fellowship Program (DNPSF)
As part of the Daayitwa Nepal Public Service Fellowship Program (DNPSF), the fellows enroll in the “Leading Innovation” course at NLA. The DNPSF program is a platform for young policy entrepreneurs to support the government to conduct economic policy research and promote evidence-based policy decisions. Our course builds leadership capacity in the fellows and equips them with the required mindset, tools, and soft skills to successfully complete their fellowship program. So far, we have offered our course to 99 DNPSF fellows, competitively selected from 28 countries, to conduct 99 research projects for 28 ministries and public agencies as well as 24 parliamentarians.
Check out our Impact Stories to learn about the leadership journey of the fellows here.
Yuwa Aaja!
The Yuwa Aaja! campaign assists in bridging the gap between government and youth to tackle domestic youth unemployment issues together. Yuwa Aaja! is a three year national campaign of the Daayitwa Movement which is supported by UK Aid in collaboration with International Labor Organization (ILO). Under this campaign, local youths are engaged in implementing youth centric policies and initiatives of the provincial and municipal government agencies. We provide leadership courses to those young civic entrepreneurs to enhance innovation and leadership capability and encourage them to act upon their self-responsibilities for nation building. We have provided our course to 45 civic entrepreneurs to organize 8 policy campaigns at federal, provincial and local levels on promoting domestic youth employment.
Yuwa Aaja! 2018/19
In April 2018, a three year national campaign, Yuwa Aaja! was launched among leading change agents from public, private, social sector and international development communities. In the first year, among 150 applications of young, innovative and energetic youths from four professional spheres- politics, civil society, bureaucracy and private sector, 30 innovation leaders have been selected by a jury composed of members from various sectors at federal, provincial and local level. The selected 30 Innovation Leaders were given a leadership course designed at Harvard University center for Public Leadership, coached by Nepal Leadership Academy (NLA). The leadership course assists the Innovation Leader to advocate for Nepali youth employment issues. Finally, the 30 Daayitwa Innovation Leaders are dispersed into teams of five to lead six different campaigns at the Federal, Provincial and Local levels of the country, with the support of UK Aid and ILO. The six campaigns focused on different cross-cutting issues that are hindering the ability of the youth in obtaining gainful and equitable work opportunities in Nepal. They are:
Yuwa Aaja! 2020
Nepal Administrative Staff College (NASC)
A prerequisite for the smooth functioning of a nation is well-trained civil servants. In our country, the responsibility of training these people lies on Nepal Administrative Staff College, an autonomous institution that provides programs and courses to bureaucrats. One of these programs is the Senior Executive Development Program (SEDP), taken by the joint secretaries of our government as a mandatory step to becoming promoted to secretaries. NLA collaborated with NASC to conduct a general review of the SEDP as an initial step in the process of updating it. The objective of the review was to produce an organized compilation of the existing modules and other course documents of the SEDP that sets the foundation for a) effective evaluation of the program and b) incorporating different approaches and frameworks to strengthen the program.