How We Work
Systems change occurs when deep learning meets creative collaboration. That’s why CDA forms strategic partnerships with operational organizations, funders, policy actors, and academic institutions across the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding nexus to facilitate bold action wherever communities experience conflict.
How We Partner
Collaborative Learning Projects
CDA believes that positive systems change happens when the people closest to complex challenges are central to defining, understanding, and transforming those challenges.
Our collaborative learning approach creates practical resources to address the challenges of working in fragile settings by engaging diverse practitioners in an inclusive, iterative process of research. We listen for the essential questions – questions that are bigger than any one institution, sector, or country – and learn with people closest to these challenges to contribute to positive change that has practical impact on real people’s lives and wider systems.
Collaborative learning starts with simple questions:
How does aid affect peace or war?
What is effective in peacebuilding, and what isn’t?
How do companies affect peace or conflict?
How do people at the “receiving end” of international aid assess its effectiveness?
Learning Partnerships
CDA is a trusted learning partner and expert in Do No Harm, conflict sensitivity, accountability to affected populations, and shifting power across the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, known for our rigorous and collaborative approach to analysis.
We’re learning together to help our partners tackle the major challenges of our time.
We engage in long-term learning partnerships to support organizations to integrate and institutionalize CDA tools and approaches into both what they do and how they do it. Our guidance is grounded in field experience, enables organizations to learn with and from each other, and is uniquely adaptable. By helping partners apply and operationalize what is most relevant to meet their specific needs and goals, we are promoting sustainable changes to shift the way we work as a sector.
Browse examples of past engagements with partners like World Vision and IFRC.
While CDA is not a funding organization, find out how to partner with us on our current collaborative learning projects or ask how our services can be personalized to your needs.
