Strategic Planning for the New Millennium

Partners revise and adapt the WLP draft curriculum for peer-to-peer strategic planning and capacity building.

With 'Peer-to-Peer Strategic Planning' colleagues help each other develop and evaluate their organizations' long-term sustainability plans

WLP and its partners are piloting a new process where peers cooperate to help each other's organizations through the strategic planning process. In peer-to-peer strategic planning, individuals familiar with the organization and its activities, and equally committed to its success, participate in developing plans for the future. Most critically, a peer has linguistic compatibility and socio-cultural understanding, and also shares the history and values of the Partnership, vision for gender justice, and knowledge of the women's movement and culturally-adapted strategies in women's rights work. This allows for deeper understanding and clearer communication between the facilitator and the organization in the strategic planning process.

Recent changes in the social and political landscape for many non-governmental women's organizations worldwide make it more difficult than ever to operate. Perhaps most striking of all is the changing economic landscape that has made financing women's rights advocacy in the developing world extremely challenging. For these reasons, organizations focused on women's advancement have further impetus to re-examine their sustainability and long-term strategic plans. To meet this need, WLP launched a peer-to-peer strategic planning program in which partner organizations exchange experiences and mentor one another.

Using a draft strategic planning curriculum developed by WLP, partners from Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Nigeria engaged in the peer-to-peer process, and tested and revised the curriculum. In the initial stage, WLP's partner in Palestine, the Women's Affairs Technical Committee (WATC) paired with WLP's Jordan partner, Sisterhood Is Global Institute/Jordan (SIGI/J). And, WLP's partner in Lebanon, Collective for Research & Training on Development-Action (CRTD-A) paired with WLP's partner in Nigeria, BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights (BAOBAB). The organizations challenged themselves to work together using the horizontal, participatory methodology in WLP's Leading to Choices leadership training manual.

SIGI/Jordan began its strategic planning process by going through each exercise in the draft curriculum to map out its vision, mission, values, and priorities. Rose Shomali, Director General of WATC, aided this process by sharing with SIGI/J what had and had not been successful at her organization. From their experience working together, several lessons emerged that will aid WLP in revising the strategic planning curriculum.

Prior to CRTD-A's visit to BAOBAB, BAOBAB staff worked with an outside expert to evaluate the organization. The process was not considered fruitful and did not yield much insight into how the organization should plan for the future. When Lina Abou Habib, Executive Director of CRTD-A, worked with BAOBAB she was already familiar with its work and was deeply committed to its mission. She was able to help BAOBAB see what was missing from their current strategic planning and to make plans for the future.

Through the process of examining BAOBAB's planning closely, CRTD-A found its own planning was helped as well. By applying a critical eye to another organization's goals and activities, CRTD-A was able to see its own work in a broader context. Furthermore, beyond the strategic plan they put on paper, the relationship between the two organizations grew and both parties gained from the exchange. An unexpected outcome was that the two organizations are now considering a staff exchange program to carry-on the knowledge-sharing process and to jointly support each other in their advocacy campaigns.

At a follow-up meeting to consider next steps, WLP partners agreed that the peer-to-peer process was critical to identifying and clarifying their vision, mission, and priorities. Organizations that had undergone their own strategic planning process independently, generally spent less time on finances and resource-mobilization than is called for in the WLP's strategic planning process, but felt that the added emphasis was an important improvement. Several organizations had used an external evaluator at one time or another during their strategic planning with widely varying results. The common denominator was that all felt it was important that the evaluator/facilitator know and understand the organization, be able to apply a gender lens to the analysis, and be a feminist. WLP's partners agreed that in order to complete a strategic plan that fully engages internal and external stakeholders, significant time and resources need to be set aside for the process that can take between one and half to two and a half years.

WLP partners will continue to test the Partnership's strategic planning process in 2009 and 2010. When the testing and adaptation process is complete, WLP will publish the curriculum on peer-to-per strategic planning in multiple languages.