Giving Compass' Take:

• In this story from IDR, the author gives advice for how nonprofit organizations ought to operate within government-run systems.

• In what areas or industries might these principles be useful in other regions, such as America?

• To learn about three ways that funders can support community-driven systems change, click here.

Since the founding of STiR—an NGO that uses networks to motivate teachers and teacher-support officials within governments—nearly seven years ago ... [w]e kept thinking, “Let’s just get our core approach to sparking intrinsic motivation clear, and the system around us will largely take care of itself.”

Today, we know everything in our operating model—including our values, measurement approach, and people-development strategies—needs to align to achieve a genuine system learning partnership. We rely on three guiding principles:

1. People are the solution, not just conduits to drive processes.

Too often we design for the lowest common denominator, meaning we try to use processes to control people within systems. In education, for example, that can mean forcing (often good) prescriptive practices that crowd out any sense of teacher autonomy.

2. We need to design for system conditions that optimize interventions.

This insight made us realize that if we can get our intrinsic motivation approach right (and we still have much to improve), we can create three pathways to system impact:

  • Direct: Developing more intrinsically motivated teachers should lead to students who are more engaged in the learning process, who apply themselves, and who believe in themselves and their teachers.
  • Amplification: Intrinsically motivated teachers will engage more deeply in the technical interventions already taking place in a system.
  • Structural: Improving the underlying structural conditions in systems sustains intrinsic motivation over time.

3. Creating genuine partnerships is enormously demanding in terms of culture—but so worth it.

A tough conversation around system conditions is really important, regardless of the sector you are in. We’ve come to learn that our particular approach is highly sensitive to four conditions:

  • The system itself must articulate a clear vision of what it really wants to prioritize achieving.
  • There must be a strong middle-tier of officials to lead the delivery and management of our approach.
  • There need to be other technical interventions that our approach can amplify (such as a reading program).
  • We need to establish a basic system “hygiene” factors (such as getting teachers paid on time) to avoid de-motivating teachers before they start.

Read the full article about innovation by Saahil Kejriwal at India Development Review (IDR).