When it comes to effecting tangible improvements in local or regional systems, collaborations across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors are of paramount importance. That said, many in philanthropy will recognize a familiar challenge: those vital collaborations can too often become unwieldy, slowing down progress and blurring the sightlines to lasting change.

In Colombia, for example, we have the opportunity to redress learning outcomes for children across the country. While many children are still falling short of expected learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy, there are sustained and deliberate efforts to ensure that every child has a high-quality education. Through the collaborative network Colombia Evidencia Potencial en Educación, or CEPE, we have been working with public authorities, philanthropic foundations, private sector companies, researchers, and educators to address that challenge.

This work has reinforced a lesson that will be familiar to many funders: when a system has many urgent needs and many actors around the table, maintaining focus is difficult. The temptation is to respond to everything at once, but without clear priorities, even well-designed public-private-philanthropic collaborations can become too broad to implement effectively or to generate meaningful evidence.

In our case, that meant making deliberate choices about where to focus, how to build alignment across different stakeholders, and how to create structures that could support locally grounded action over time.

Locally-Rooted Systems Change: Shared Intent Does Not Eliminate Tension

One challenge many funders, perhaps especially those focused on education, as we are, will recognize is that broad agreement on a goal does not automatically lead to alignment on how to get there. In collaborative efforts, especially those that bring together several actors, participants often come to the table with different priorities and definitions of success.

In our case, while there was shared commitment to improving children’s learning outcomes, some actors were more focused on reading and writing skills or socio-emotional learning, while others were more interested in technology or vocational training. The result was a familiar risk: that a coalition with genuine shared intent could still be pulled in too many directions to have any meaningful impact.

Read the full article about locally-rooted systems change by Camilo Andrés Morales and Ana Cubillo at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.