In fiscal year 2003, CARE India was faced with the challenge of repositioning itself within India’s development landscape, and undertook an initiative to define a program focus and realign its organization. We describe here how process analysis was used to support this initiative.
Background
In July 2002, the Government of India (GOI) began a process that led to the suspension of the major food commodity CARE India imported for distribution (cornsoy blend), on the grounds that it was genetically modified (GMO) and might be hazardous. In the months that followed, CARE India was at the receiving end of much negative publicity in the Indian press. This implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) called into question CARE’s relevance in the Indian development landscape and reinforced CARE India’s public image as a large, American food agency.
Since CARE India’s food program was, in many ways, the foundation of the mission’s work, the possibility of the significant loss of food resources accelerated a process of re-thinking the CO strategy, alignment with vision, program focus, relationships, program quality and accountability. The GOI decision coincided with the arrival of Steve Hollingworth as the new Country Director (CD). Steve had been assigned to CARE India with a mandate to work with the senior management team (SMT) to lead the shift toward addressing underlying causes of poverty and marginalization in India.
The stoppage of cornsoy blend highlighted questions about the validity of CARE India’s food program in the current Indian context, and revealed misalignments between the CARE vision and CARE India’s program strategy, relationships, resources, systems and structures Outside of the food program too, there was a lack of coherence in CARE India’s program efforts, with a dispersed portfolio of projects, covering a wide spectrum of sectors and addressing a broad range of issues. For some staff, there was a feeling that CARE India was: (1) adrift programmatically, (2) disconnected from the dynamic development discourse going on within Indian civil society, and (3) increasingly redundant in a country whose socioeconomic context and role in the world has changed significantly in recent decades. CARE India therefore faced a critical need to redefine its strategy and to develop integrated programs and organizational capabilities to more fully participate in the growth and development of India’s anti-poverty movement.
The Context for using Process Analysis
To explore and create this new organizational identity, the SMT led a year-long examination of CARE’s relevance in India and systematically built the case for a change in program focus. An organizational review process was undertaken to develop and articulate the new program focus. Process Analysis was used as part of the organizational review to identify areas of strength and opportunities for future focus.
CARE India’s organizational structure and funding pattern encouraged thinking and planning in terms of projects and sectors. Its technical capacity was also developed project by project at the sectoral level. The needs to develop integrated multi-sectoral programs that address underlying causes of India’s poverty provided a natural impetus to move away from a narrow sectoral approach and towards thinking about common capacities that can be strategically leveraged in future programming. Care India used process analysis to systematically:
- Understand the key strategic objectives that represent the thematic areas for CARE India to focus on.
- Define the common processes (or work activities) across sectors and projects. These represent the project-related activities performed by CARE India and how they are sequenced in order to successfully implement programs and projects.
- Prioritize the processes by evaluating their impact on the strategic drivers.
- Documenting the critical processes in greater detail to build capacity
- Assessing possible risks in implementing these processes as a standard approach to doing work at CARE India.
