Re-Imagining Technical Assistance in the Democratic Republic of Congo

African mother sitting outside of a health post with a baby on her lap.
Photo: Kate Holt/MCSP

Key Dates

March 19-20, 2019 and May 2019 Intent and Conceptualization Workshops, September-October 2019 alignment and immersion, December 6-11, 2019 Design Sprint, and March 4-6, 2020 Integration Workshop

Co-Creation Team

Co-creation teams are multi-disciplinary groups that represent a diverse range of stakeholder perspectives. In DRC, the project utilized a co-creation team to drive the design process forward through problem definition, idea generation, prototyping, testing, and prioritization. After working together to define the problem, generate some ideas for solutions, and identify themes for principles of good TA, three opportunity areas emerged:

Opportunity Areas

Re-imagining interactions to build local ownership and support strategic decision-making; Re-imagining feedback loops and data sharings to support contextualisation and decentralisation; Re-imagining incentives and budgeting structure to maximize impact and support the strengthening of the health system

Working together during the final two workshops, the co-creation team was able to integrate all of the previous phases of work into a roadmap for change. This roadmap brought together the various concepts, principles for good TA, and actions to be taken by the different levels and actors  of the TA system in DRC, under four domains for change.

The Four Domains of Change to Good Technical Assistance

1- optimize finance to build on the long term; 2- support to reinforce governance; 3- cultivate collaboration and transparency; 4- reduce external dependencies in favor of sustainability