Balancing Needs: Three Insights in Building a Co-Design Approach Across Multiple Countries

A top priority at Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) is collaborating closely with partners to ensure our program design and implementation truly align with partners’ needs (i.e., a co-design approach). This co-design approach is especially vital when our goal is to garner consensus across multiple countries of implementation around next steps in a given program, while also balancing individual countries’ political and policy priorities. 

To help realize this priority in DG’s Data on Youth and Tobacco in Africa (DaYTA) program, we built upon our co-design approach, integrating it into all activities throughout the first year of program implementation. This culminated in a four-day workshop with partners on October 30 – November 2 in Naivasha, Kenya, which was the first time we’ve convened government officials from multiple countries at this scale to engage in co-design along with other non-governmental partners. Reflecting on this workshop and the work preceding it, we’ve identified three insights below on how to co-design with stakeholders representing multiple countries.

Three Insights on a Multi-National, Multi-Partner Co-design Approach

1. Strive to engage a diversity of partners and tailor engagement based on their expertise, interest, and availability: From government departments and subcontractors to civil society organizations, every partner brings a unique perspective and expertise. Therefore, a successful co-design approach will deeply engage each partner throughout the process to ensure their valuable input is given and reflected in program design and implementation, based on their area of expertise and availability. Outside of meetings with the full consortium of partners, an important step in DG’s co-design approach is understanding individual partner’s communication style and availability in order to understand and address their involvement throughout the rest of the program.
   
   For example, in the consortium of DaYTA partners, we have many experts—both within and across DaYTA countries—who are working in such sectors as research, academia, public health, tobacco control, media, and youth advocacy, among others. Because tobacco use and youth is so nuanced, we rely on each partners’ insights from their sectors to create programmatic solutions to improve the creation and implementation of tobacco control policy. Therefore, our primary goal in co-designing is ensuring that all partners are engaged throughout the process.
2. Emphasize equity across co-design partners by creating opportunities for cross-country collaboration as well as country-specific discussions: Each partner brings value to co-design; however, every partner is also working in their own country and in their own context. Therefore, some needs, concerns, or (even) insights might not be appropriate to share across the entire consortium of co-design partners—as a result of anything from time constraints to political or cultural aspects that are unique to one context.
   
   Prior to the workshop in Naivasha, we facilitated independent country-level workshops in which country teams could dive deep into the concerns, needs, and next steps of their work. Then once convened in Naivasha, we facilitated cross-learning through mixed-country breakout sessions and ensured that a variety of stakeholders had the opportunity to share their insights, findings, concerns, etc. in plenary. Additionally, we continued to provide opportunities for country-specific sessions. Finally, across all sessions, we had English to French (and vice versa) interpretation to ensure all partners were included and each session was accessible.
3. Create governance structures or mechanisms to engage partners at the country and cross-country levels: One important next step that was identified during the workshop in Naivasha was the need for new governance structures and mechanisms—such as steering committees or advisory councils—in and across the three DaYTA countries. While collaborating across governance structures in three countries in a coordinated manner will be a new opportunity for DG, we’ve seen the benefit these types of structures can have on stakeholder engagement in specific countries. Specifically, in implementing DG’s TCDI program, a technical advisory board was formed in the DRC as part of the illicit trade research. Due to the success of this structure in meaningfully engaging technical stakeholders from government and academia, as well as the fact that governance structures are an industry best practice, we agreed that having similar structures for DaYTA in each country would be the best way to continue the momentum started at this workshop and provide active touchpoints for updates and feedback throughout implementation.

Keep an eye out for more insights as DaYTA moves forward with the co-design process, creating new governing structures, and beginning primary research on adolescent tobacco use!