Continuous Learning

Development issues (both problems and opportunities) are increasingly complex and as a result development organisations need to be smart, agile, and responsive.  Development organisations need to be better at what they do, to learn more from their experiences, to continually improve to be able to adapt to an ever-changing reality.  Development organisations need to learn how to learn.

A key problem faced by development practitioners and communities alike is the lack of access to current relevant information because of a lack of appropriate and useful documentation.  This results in the fact that people involved in programs (and other people interested in programs) are unable to learn from, or feed into, new approaches in a timely fashion.

Recording how things develop, analyzing what makes projects work, what causes projects to fail, who is (and who is not) benefiting from projects across geographical areas and subject matter areas and making this available to the development community is vital to ensure greater impact and effectiveness.

Learning and experimentation are major features of the ACCESS Phase II approach to support the community to plan for its own development.  This is reflected in the design, the participatory methodology and the Gender and Social Inclusive approach of ACCESS Phase II overall, and in the integration of participatory monitoring and learning into all stages of program implementation.