Action Aid: A Case Study

Article in the UK
September 2003

ActionAid, the UK’s third largest development agency, has turned to e-learning to help it not only re-discover its roots but also to help it achieve its aim of eradicating poverty through helping people, families and communities to identify and demand their human rights.

Re-discovering reasons

While most countries have signed the declaration and conventions set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is still a great deal of work to be done in the world before every human being achieves the basic rights set out in this declaration. The international charity, ActionAid (AA) – which is the UK’s third largest development agency - believes that poverty will not end until basic rights are both recognised and achieved.

AA’s vision is of a world without poverty in which everyone can exercise his/her right to a life of dignity. Its mission is to work with poor and marginalised people to eradicate poverty by overcoming the injustice and inequity that cause it. As an organisation, it lives and works by the values of mutual respect, equity and justice, honesty and transparency, solidarity with poor and marginalised people, courage of conviction, and humility. It believes that, by working with poor local communities, national governments and international organisations, it can help bring about change that should help to eradicate poverty and help people to successfully address the issues that have led to their marginalisation.

Formed just over 30 years ago, AA currently works in 36 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, involving itself in rights and justice issues - listening to, learning from and working in partnership with over 9m of the world’s poorest people.

The impetus for AA came from its founder, Cecil Jackson-Cole, a businessman who believed that businesspeople should actively support charities. He became the first honorary secretary of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (later known as Oxfam) in 1942. In the late 1950s, he established the Voluntary and Christian Service Trust, which helped to set up Help the Aged, and, in 1972, Action in Distress (AID). AID became ActionAid in 1979, the same year that Jackson-Cole died, aged 78.

AA, which now employs some 2,000 people around the world and has formed partnerships with organisations in Spain, Italy, Ireland, France and with nearly 2,000 organisations in the developing world,  acknowledges that its ‘institutional memory’, experience, expertise and history were being lost and has turned to Shared Learning, it’s knowledge Management initiative and e-learning to help capture these things before it is too late.

Dharitri Patnaik, AA’s head of Shared Learning, explained: “ActionAid is a unique organisation which has local national staff working in all its country programmes. It is essential for us to be retaining our international characteristic while remaining rooted to our national identities. All ActionAiders need to understand and embrace our history,principles, objectives and approaches in order to play a strong role in fighting poverty together.

“We knew that we had to encapsulate our history and values into learning materials that could be made readily available to all ActionAiders around the world, so we decided to develop an ‘orientation’ e-learning programme and invited tenders to produce it.

“We had a presentation from Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) and we knew of the similar work that they had done for UNICEF but, initially, we went to a different producer,” she continued. “However, we became unhappy with this other company’s proposals and sent out fresh invitations to tender. In the end, we chose TIS because of the quality of their work.”

Working with AA staff, TIS developers have produced an e-learning programme that encapsulates AA’s history: how it has evolved as an organisation. The orientation pack also explains the role of the individual within the organisation.

“We intend the pack – which is available in five languages - to be used not just as induction learning for new recruits but also as learning materials for experienced AA workers who have spent their careers working in one job, office and/or country and who need to gain an appreciation of AA’s wider – global – role,” Patnaik said.

“It is AA’s policy that all of its key documents must be produced in five languages: English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese and French,” explained Abigail Taylor, AA’s internal communications and shared learning manager in the UK. “The orientation pack was written first in English and then sent for translation. All the language versions of the pack are being made available on CD-ROM and the pack is also printable for those who want a hard copy. It is also being made available via AA’s knowledge management intranet – known as ‘shared learning’ - which is accessible to our staff throughout the world."

Taylor continued: “Being a global organisation, we invited tenders to produce this e-learning from experienced e-learning developers. The tenders went out in June 2003. We reviewed the responses in early July and produced a shortlist of two companies, one of which was TIS.

“We’d seen similar work that TIS had done for UNICEF and felt that TIS understood both the organisation and what AA wanted from this project. We awarded the project to TIS is late July and the product was developed throughout August – on target.

“The TIS development team was highly professional in its approach and highly competent in its work – and, importantly, we were able to build an excellent rapport with the TIS team. It was easy to communicate with them – by telephone or email – and they were quick to understand and accommodate our suggestions as the project went on,” she added. “We decided on the contents of the orientation pack and provided available material, while TIS suggested the’ structure and approach. Naturally, we encouraged TIS to be as creative as possible in the way they developed and presented the material in the pack.”

TIS is now working with AA on another project: to develop e-learning materials for an ‘empowerment and rights’ learning pack. Patnaik explained: “For many years, a major part of AA’s activities has been centred around building people’s capacity to discover and understand what their rights are within their society.

“The aim of this e-learning material is to provide a simple and practical interactive programme that will engage users and motivate them to identify and pursue their rights. This is not a ‘typical’ course. It is more like ‘discovery learning’ because it concentrates on asking questions and presenting case studies rather than being prescriptive.

“It is scheduled to be circulated widely throughout non-government organisations around the world,” she said. “We are not selling the programme. Rather, we are making it available to those who want to use it, as part of our commitment to promoting human rights around the globe.

“Again, we expect this programme to be made available on CD-ROM, in printable form, online via the AA shared learning intranet and via the AA website,” she continued. “If it proves popular and effective, we will produce several more pieces of e-learning and distribute them in these ways. These e-learning programmes would relate to our other activities – working with poor and marginalised communities to assert their rights and live a life with dignity.”

By Bob Little