Stakeholder, Where Art Thou?: Three Insights on Using Governance Structures to Foster Stakeholder Engagement
Since Development Gateway: An IREX Venture’s (DG’s) founding, we have prioritized working closely with multiple stakeholders—including everyone from local technical experts to government ministries and global partners—when developing digital solutions and gathering data. Through our Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI) program and its sister program Data on Youth and Tobacco in Africa (DaYTA), we have learned that creating governance structures, such as advisory boards or steering committees, is one approach to ensuring that digital solutions appropriately meet stakeholders’ needs and foster future engagement from them. In this blog, we explore three insights on how governance structures can advance buy-in with individual stakeholders while connecting them to one another.
Why Governance Structures?
Governance structures—which are best practice to have when conducting primary research—have been essential to DG’s tobacco control work, because many of our stakeholders have indicated their desire to be included throughout program implementation and not just at the end. Several have echoed the common refrain: “You can’t do something for us without us.” We’ve also found that governance structures help coordinate collaboration across our stakeholders, especially since we have a group of stakeholders with very different backgrounds, expertise, and areas of interest in our tobacco control work. These stakeholders also all have different perspectives and varied ways in which they engage with our work. Therefore, DG has formed various governance structures in both our TCDI program and DaYTA program.
The Role of Governance Structures in TCDI and DaYTA
DG formed two advisory boards in the first phase of TCDI: one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one in Zambia. These advisory boards ensure that stakeholders are updated when the program meets key milestones, including when data, needs assessments, and research protocol are validated; the boards also supported the launch of illicit trade studies in the DRC and in Zambia.
DG’s successful implementation of these governance structures in TCDI paved the way for the formation of the following governance bodies to support DaYTA:
- A new Advisory Board in the DRC (building off the one from TCDI),
- The Survey Implementation Group and the Youth Advisory Group in Nigeria, and
- The Research Advisory Committee in Kenya.
All of these structures have a similar composition and a shared mandate; each one consists of a small group of technical experts who provide technical direction and advice on the research implementation on youth tobacco use in Kenya, Nigeria, and the DRC.
DG also formed a steering committee in the DRC. Its purview is more strategic and less technical relative to the advisory board; it is led by a high-level public official from DRC’s Ministry of Health and includes stakeholders from civil society organizations, government, academia, and partners in tobacco control (like the World Health Organization) who are working to align the research with government policy.
Additionally, to ensure coordination across countries, we also convened a meeting of the full DaYTA consortium with representatives from all three countries—in-person to start, then a mix of virtual and in-person at key program milestones.
These governance structures have proved successful in giving stakeholders a clearly defined space in which to engage—both in a country-specific and cross-country manner. As we’ve implemented and improved our approach to these governance structures across TCDI and DaYTA, we’ve gathered three insights on how these structures can be beneficial for stakeholders and project implementers alike.
- Governance structures are time-saving mechanisms that support program implementation by creating space for trust building between partners at every level. This trust allows the government partner to validate the implementing partners’ actions with regional and local stakeholders. Specifically, when a government partner at the central level (e.g., a ministry of health) is part of a governance structure and is informed on the status of project work, they can provide support in facilitating program implementation by doing such things as providing letters of introduction at the beginning and signing off on the results at dissemination; their ongoing support helps ensure that stakeholders at every level know that the implementers’ project has the government’s support.
This support was especially crucial in the DRC. During the implementation of the illicit trade study during TCDI, the team encountered implementation challenges at the province level from officials who hadn’t been formally introduced to the program. Learning from this, we prioritized getting letters of introduction from the central ministry of health in advance of the youth data study on DaYTA, and the steering committee helped expedite its approval and signature. - Governance structures increase coordination and joint ownership. Stakeholder engagement is essential for long-term success of a program’s work and its long-term sustainability and use. Governance structures create lines of communication amongst stakeholders across sectors and in some cases, across countries. These communication lines foster a sense of joint ownership in the ultimate research output and the technical product that is created. Because this country-specific coordination is formalized and integrated from the beginning of the program, DG and our stakeholders alike hold each other accountable for working constructively towards a common goal. This coordination has been especially important for DaYTA in particular, since we are focused on getting buy-in from stakeholders in all three countries regarding the cross-country nature of the program.
As such, we kicked off program implementation with the full DaYTA consortium meeting, with five representatives from government, academia, and civil society organizations from each country, plus all of our implementing partners. To continue the collaboration (both within and across countries), we kicked off the formation of the various technical advisory bodies and also committed to reconvening the full group both virtually and in-person throughout program implementation. - Governance structures are not a one-size-fits-all solution and should be tailored based on stakeholders’ interests and expertise. Creating governance structures that segment stakeholders by audience, expertise, or interest allows stakeholders’ time and involvement to be more effective and conversations to be more productive. This tailored approach builds upon DG’s rich history of engaging various stakeholders in varying ways and has led to increased trust and flexibility by our stakeholders—because they see us taking significant steps to meet them where they are.
For example, the advisory board for the TCDI illicit trade study in the DRC was too large to be equally beneficial to all its members, and as a result, some non-technical members found the discussions to be overly technical and difficult to follow. So, for DaYTA, we split the stakeholder group into two groups based on interest, availability, and expertise. Similarly, in Nigeria, the governance bodies are separated by age, with a Survey Implementation Group for our traditional stakeholders and the Youth Advisory Group which is focused on engaging and capturing feedback from youth stakeholders.
Moving forward, DaYTA will monitor the progress and impact of these governance structures, keeping an eye on new developments and opportunities for further engagement. Stay tuned for more!