Partnership Quality in Multi Actors Settings

What: This indicator measures the quality of partnerships in multi-actor settings. A multi-actor partnership is considered to be of high quality when 1. All stakeholders have a shared vision, 2. Roles and responsibilities are clear, 3. Well-defined processes for work planning are in place, 4. Communication lines, rules and technologies are well defined, 5. Problem-solving mechanisms are in place, and 6. All actors are able to make their voice heard. Why: Partnership quality is paramount to achieving a project’s vision and goals in a multi-actor partnership. While partnerships must be guided by a shared vision, having one is not enough: Research has shown that partnerships are more successful when a common vision exists, when the shared vision and each organization’s vision are aligned, when there is certainty about each organization’s role, and when a clear commitment to action exists. When: All Multi Actors Partnership programs should apply this indicator. It can also be used for consortia programs and projects.

Method: This indicator should be collected as a feedback form to be filled out by all participating stakeholders.

1. The lead stakeholder should send out the questionnaire to all participating stakeholders.
2. Each stakeholder should fill out the questionnaire collaboratively in a meeting of their leadership committee and send it to the lead stakeholder.
3. The lead stakeholder should then aggregate the responses and calculate the indicator. It is strongly encouraged that following the indicator calculation, leaders from all involved organizations reunite to discuss how they can further improve the quality of their partnership based on the indicator results.

Questions:

How to calculate:

For each stakeholder, apply the following steps:

1. For each stakeholder, sum up the scores to each response to achieve a from a theoretical minimum of zero (6) to a theoretical maximum of 30.
2. The indicator value is the average score across all partnership actors, i.e. sum of individual scores (numerator) divided by the number of stakeholders that submitted their responses (denominator).

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Partnership quality is defined differently in various contexts. Important guidance on this topic stems from USAID’s Global Health Knowledge Collaborative (GHKC) Knowledge Management (KM) Indicator Library (link, link), BOND’s “The Partnership Initiative”, and Welthungerhilfe’s own practice.

The indicator as defined above compiles the most commonly used dimensions of partnership quality in a simple-to-use index, but other approaches to measure partnership quality may also be appropriate depending on the implementation context.