Combating Wildlife Crime in Southern Africa

The Challenge
The recent and rapid increase in the illegal trade in wildlife threatens the survival of endangered species in southern Africa. In 2013 alone, an estimated 30,000 African elephants were killed for their ivory. This represents an alarming 80 animals per day. To assist enforcement efforts, USAID Southern Africa seeks to develop partnerships with organizations working to combat wildlife crime in Southern Africa and jointly identify, develop, and test innovative approaches that can be shared throughout the region. This effort fits into a larger effort on the part of USAID to engage the public, private, and civil sectors in combating illegal wildlife trade, including an additional project to enroll the transportation industry as a partner to law enforcement, called ROUTES (Reducing Opportunities for Unlawful Transport of Endangered Species).

The Approach
USAID Southern Africa convened a series of terrestrial and virtual workshops to develop common understanding of the problems/challenges, establish consensus on areas for collaborative action to reduce duplication and achieve greater scale, and create an agreed upon approaches for action. To achieve these objectives, facilitators used the Solve-It method to:
  1. Rapidly convene. In a matter of weeks, facilitators coordinated bringing together core stakeholders from across Southern Africa to attend the workshop in Pretoria.
  2. Engage stakeholders early. Facilitators conducted a set of interviews with workshop participants from around the region and around the world to understand their different perspectives and desired outcomes for the sessions.
  3. Team formation. Southern Africa is a big place and many participants have worked on this issue for decades but often in isolation from each other. Facilitators “went slow to go fast” — taking the time to really build up trust among the participants to create a lasting foundation for collaboration.
  4. Lean startup innovation. Participants used facilitator toolkits to rapidly come to consensus on opportunities for near- and long-term engagement.
  5. Comprehensive approach. Facilitators leveraged their involvement in the ROUTES Project to identify opportunities to leverage and scale the efforts in Southern Africa to other regions.
The Results
This workshop laid a foundation for collaboration with an array of public and civil sector actors on the development of approaches that effectively link stronger enforcement, including crime prevention, with improved wildlife management. Accomplishments to date include:
  • Issue clarity. In a very short amount of time, participants brought the issues into clearer focus for each other, laying the groundwork for more effective resource allocation and division of responsibilities across the region and the participating organizations.
  • Rapid co-design. In the initial workshop, facilitators worked with the participating teams to co-create an overarching vision and strategy with more than 25 wildlife conservation experts from the region, and developed a set nine fundable Concept Note MVPs. These nine concepts were then reduced down to five specific projects funded by USAID.
  • Five new project launches. As a result of the co-creation process, USAID has now funded five new programs to combat wildlife crime across the Southern Africa Development Community. These new projects, currently in their first year of execution, are working on the ground to involve local law enforcement, local and national governments, local communities, and the private sector to save endangered species.

 

Democracy Rights and Governance (DRG): Advancing Integrity in the Media Co-Creation Workshop

The Challenge
USAID's Democracy Right and Governance wanted to address the threat of disinformation in local contexts, consider best practices to inform programming strategies and priorities, and develop a set of fundable concepts for adaptive and measurable solutions.

The Approach
Facilitators worked closely with USAID's Democracy, Rights, and Governance (DRG) Center's Advancing Integrity in the Media (AIM) to co-create a workshop that convened 18 thought leaders, implementers, and academics from a diverse array of institutions across the globe to more clearly define the problem of disinformation and to discuss and develop innovative solutions to the problems it poses. Participants were interviewed prior to the workshop, engaging them to better understand their needs, barriers and motivators in this space and used those insights to inform workshop development. Participants quickly trained to use collective impact methods and design thinking principles to form multi-disciplinary teams and develop possible solutions. With the Solve-It toolkit, participants developed innovative concept notes that were submitted to DRG for funding.

The Results
Workshop participants formed a set of multi-disciplinary teams and submitted multiple concepts. After greenlighting two concepts and mentoring a third, USAID DRG funded three full proposals for a total nearing $10 million. These projects will work in Central Asia and Africa to combat disinformation at state and local level and train both creators and consumers of news on media integrity and accountability.

Ebola Tech Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) Inter-Operability Co-Design

The Challenge
Countries impacted by Ebola suffer from weak health systems overall, compounded by often even weaker healthcare information systems that often don’t talk to each other across various ministries within a country — much less across different ministries in multiple countries. USAID wanted to convene a cross-sector group of highly technical information systems developers, on-the-ground implementers, end users, and donors to fundamentally re-conceive how all these parties manage the interoperability of systems and data across healthcare and healthcare information systems. USAID especially wanted to tightly focus the systems development community on coming up with breakthrough ideas, development approaches, and technical architectures that USAID and other donors could adapt and fund.

The Approach
USAID asked facilitators to work on a very compressed timeline to prepare for a three-day workshop involving multiple streams of co-creation that would, at times, involve all the stakeholders — donors, developers, implementers, end users — and at other times involve various parallel streams of stakeholders working within their specific communities. Facilitators adapted their methods to conduct:
  • Rapid workshop design. Due to the very technical nature of the workshop and the multiple agendas, facilitators needed to balance what would in essence become three workshops inside of one overarching workshop. Facilitators used a modular framework and combined it with other tools USAID had already used in prior work. This enabled facilitators to produce a design for a workshop that had a lot of moving parts in only a few days. 
  • Concept Note MVPs. USAID wanted to come out of the workshop with a set of “fundable ideas” that needed to be rapidly refined and put through peer review and procurement. Facilitators produced a set of comprehensive, well-developed “concept notes” that USAID successfully took forward to the next stage of the BAA process.
  • Participant ownership. As a result of the truly co-creative experience facilitators created in the workshop, many of the participants felt such a high degree of ownership of the ideas they developed that they continued to work on them long after the workshop.
     
The Results
  • Final Concept Notes. The participants produced a set of concept notes that USAID successfully moved to the next stage of the BAA and procurement process.
  • Institutional Commitment. The participants developed a strong sense of ownership for their ideas and for tackling this very complicated challenge of improving healthcare system interoperability.
  • Donor Roadmap. Worked with donors to create the elements of a cooperative framework for donors to support healthcare information systems interoperability.


Honey Bee Health Coalition

The Challenge
One in three bites of food require pollination. Over $85 billion in American agriculture relies on honey bees. Commercial beekeepers face a multitude of problems in maintaining their hives so they can provide this invaluable service to the food chain. At the same time, a lack of consensus on the underlying causes, combined with a lack of trust among many of the key stakeholders and the ever-more specialized nature of modern agriculture, has marooned the vital honey bee.

The Approach
In the spring of 2013, facilitators helped organize a first-of-its-kind Honey Bee Health Summit with over 100 stakeholders to get clear on the causes of declining bee health and how they could help. They then worked with the Keystone Policy Center to form the Honey Bee Health Coalition consisting now of 34 cross-sector member-organizations, including beekeepers, farmers, crop associations, agribusinesses, chemical companies, retailers, food manufacturers, consumer packaged goods companies, trade associations, conservation organizations and other nonprofits, state and local government agencies, and multiple national government agencies (including the Canadian Honey Council, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the White House).

Facilitators also led “Bee Understanding”, an innovative job-swap program letting stakeholders “walk a mile in the other guy’s boots” to understand how their decisions impact bee health and capturing their experiences in a documentary film.

The Results
In response to the President’s call for public private partnerships, the Coalition is the only true public-private partnership to-date and has established:
  • Bee Healthy Roadmap. Participants used a multi-stakeholder approach to develop a plan of action for materially improving honey bee health across the four priority areas.
  • Governance. Participants established a Steering Committee and Working Group structure to oversee progress on the Roadmap.
  • Pilot projects. Each working group has launched at least one pilot to test whether it can materially improve honey bee health. To date, these pilots have produced a “quick guide” for reporting bee losses to strengthen the data and science underlying our understanding of bee health, and the first-ever best management practices guide for controlling Varroa destructor mites considered by many scientists to be one of the leading causes of honey bee health declines. The guide has been downloaded over 10,000 times by beekeepers in more than 120 countries.
  • Job swaps and documentary films. A multi-stakeholder design lab was used to create an interactive experience that will change mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors.
  • Continuing close coordination with the National Task Force. The White House Office on Science and Technology Policy recognized the Coalition for its effective work to date, and the Coalition continues to work closely with the cross-agency working groups focused on this vital issue. The Coalition is currently working with multiple state and provincial authorities to rollout Managed Pollinator Protection Plans across the United States and Canada.
  • Stabilization of the honey bee population. While honey bee health is a multi-factorial problem and it is nearly impossible to directly correlate specific interventions with changes in bee health, the overall decline in honey bee health has begun to stabilize.


LAUNCH 2.0

The Challenge

By most measures, LAUNCH — a unique partnership among NASA, Nike, the U.S. State Department, and USAID — has been an incredible success. LAUNCH pioneered challenges, forging the framework that became the basis of Grand Challenges. LAUNCH held some of the first prizes and challenges, creating one of the original open innovation platforms. LAUNCH also created one of the most prestigious networks for innovators on the planet. Which begs the question: What to do for a second act?

The Approach

USAID asked facilitators to work on a very compressed timeline to prepare for a two-day workshop involving the founding LAUNCH partners (Nike and the government agencies) and the implementing partners (a consortium of support contractors). Facilitators used their formula to conduct:

  1. Rapid workshop design. In the short time allotted, facilitators used the Formula’s modular approach to quickly design an overall workshop framework, engage the partners, and lay the groundwork for a second workshop. 
  2. Partner engagement. Facilitators conducted a set of interviews with workshop participants to understand their different perspectives. During the interviews, facilitators unearthed that all of the partners had experienced significant turnover — none of the people now responsible for LAUNCH had been involved at its inception. Moreover, facilitators uncovered that the institutional commitment and documentation was uneven or in some cases lacking altogether.   
  3. Co-Visioning and MVP. Using this information, facilitators worked with workshop participants to re-imagine LAUNCH 2.0, structure a Minimum Viable Partnership (MVP), and develop a foundation that participants could use to secure institutional commitment. Facilitators also laid the groundwork for a second convening to finalize the design for LAUNCH 2.0. 
  4. Design of LAUNCH 2.0. Participants used the outcomes of the first workshop to get clear on expectations and secure greater commitment from their respective organizations. With that buy-in, facilitators were then able to host a second convening and bring in representatives from the original LAUNCH partners as well as LAUNCH Nordic, a “spin out” involving the Nordic nations, IKEA, and Novozymes. Facilitators used this session to incorporate the more fully developed expectations and requirements of the partners, flesh out the MVP started in the first workshop, and then develop a supporting timeline and action plan.
     
The Results
  • Institutional Commitment. The parties were able to ensure each partner had the commitment of their respective organizations.
  • Shared Vision for an MVP. Given that none of the decision-makers were involved at the inception of LAUNCH, it was vital that they create a new, shared vision grounded in an MVP that they could explain to other stakeholders.
  • Scalable Model. LAUNCH has aspirations to go beyond its founding partners to create a model that other organizations, governments, and nations can adapt and use. By capturing the experiences of the LAUNCH Nordic partners and conducting additional market research, LAUNCH is well on its way to developing just such a model.

 

Reducing Opportunities for Unlawful Transport of Endangered Species (ROUTES)

The Challenge
The illegal trade in wildlife by highly organized criminal gangs forms one of the largest black markets in the world, threatening biodiversity, human health and safety, and global security. These gangs use logistics- and transport-intensive activities, co-opting the legal air-, land-, and seaports, passenger and cargo airlines, shipping companies, express couriers, freight forwarders, and others as unwitting accomplices in their nefarious activities.

The Approach
ROUTES is an innovative and transformational partnership bringing together international conservation organizations, donors and governments, and the transportation and logistics industry for a multi-year collaborative program to disrupt wildlife trafficking by reducing the use of legal transportation supply chains. To achieve this goal, facilitators rapidly convened the core stakeholders, co-created a dynamic network of collaborators, developed an overarching vision and plan, identified a series of high priority activities, and are in the process of deploying a strategic communications plan and set of pilot programs.

The Results
To maximize results and impact, ROUTES will focus year one and two activities on air transportation supply chains to take advantage of the current high level of commitment and champions in that industry. Over time, facilitators will expand and work with freight, courier and mail services linked to air transportation and target engagement with maritime transportation. Accomplishments to date include:

  • Rapid co-design. Co-created an overarching vision and strategy with more than 20 wildlife and transportation experts from around the world and developed a set of lean start-up plans.
  • Prioritized action. Fleshed out the initial start-up plans for a) improving data analytics, b) engaging corporate leadership, c) integrating wildlife trafficking into relevant industry standards and protocols, and d) increasing passenger and client awareness of wildlife trafficking issues.
  • C-Suite Commitment. As a result of its work with ROUTES, the International Air Transport Association (IATA, the leading trade association for airlines) sponsored a General Resolution requiring all IATA members to help combat wildlife trafficking on their aircraft. The CEOs of the major airlines voted on and adopted the General Resolution. Working with the Royal Foundation of their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of York and His Royal Highness Prince Harry, more than 100 transportation companies signed the Buckingham Palace Declaration, requiring them to help combat wildlife trafficking.
  • Pilot programs leading to global roll-out. ROUTES successfully piloted training programs for front-line airline and airport workers in multiple priority airports and transit locations around the world. The success of these programs has now led the IATA to agree to provide the training on their platform for their 200+ members and Airports Council International (the leading trade association for airports) to join the Partnership.


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