Rapid Action Learning

Rapid Action Learning approaches are a range of participatory action-orientated learning and research methods that  use ‘timely, relevant, and actionable’ as key criteria and fundamental components to rigour.

Video: Robert Chambers explains “what is Rapid Action Learning and how was it developed?”

This framework evolved through the Sanitation Learning Hub’s work with various partners during the Swachh Bharat Mission in India, the world’s largest sanitation programme, as a way to keep in touch with up-to-date grounded realities of both communities and implementers. RAL methods include workshops, immersions and rapid topic explorations involving governments, development partners and local communities. Methods are inductive in orientation, explorative, and experimental, applying adaptive management principles to learning processes, adapting and innovating based on what is found to have worked and to have been useful by participants and knowledge users.

The widespread need for timely, relevant and actionable learning and its feedback to policy and practice is rarely met by conventional, traditional scientifically rigorous and academic research. This is due to a multitude of reasons, including the disconnect between research and practice, the format that research is delivered in being inaccessible (journal articles requiring payment to access, long reports), and timescales being vastly different between researchers and practitioners.

In addition, time is spent negotiating funding and partnerships, interacting with funding and partner agencies, recruiting staff, setting up field work, pilot testing methods, training investigators, analysing data, and writing a report or related output. This process means it can take months or years before findings are available for use. In the meantime, realities, priorities and learning needs evolve, especially in the context of a vigorous national campaign, making it challenging for research to be relevant.

Responding to this challenge, the RAL framework and various methods aim to produce timely findings, which:

• are relevant to policy and practice,
• identify people who are at risk of being left behind,
• enable their voices to be heard, and
• can be acted upon.

RAL will not be appropriate to answer every research question, for example, if changes in gender norms have occurred in a community over a period of several years. However, RAL can be used in a complementary way – where smaller changes can be observed and responded to in real time, and larger scale and longer-timeframe studies can be conducted once an appropriate period of time has passed.

Just like Participatory Action Research has been proposed as a discipline that complements more conventional social science, RAL processes have both supplemented and challenged conventional research methods typically employed in the sanitation and hygiene sector.

Some of the challenges to using Rapid Action Learning are presented in this video:

Design and principles

For those planning and conducting activities, there are two critical interdependent phases with important considerations in each:

Developing and implementing learning agendas and activities

• Engage policy-makers, practitioners and communities throughout the process. This should start from the development of the questions and/or learning agenda.
• Methods and questions should evolve over time, and learning objectives and outputs must be clear, focused and measurable.
• Flexibility – trial new methods and don’t be afraid to innovate and improvise.
• Conduct research that aligns to the needs and timelines of government and programme implementers and does not produce findings too late to be of use.
• Consider methodologies and activities which allow researchers and practitioners to work together.
• Learning should be emergent and reflective of the needs of a project/ programme/sector – research questions and lines of enquiry need to be co-created with relevant stakeholders.
• Do not narrow in too early (or ideally not at all!) – consider complexity and multiple causation.
• Recommendations and innovations which emerge need to be adaptable according to context and trialled in a number of contexts. Again, these should be discussed and co-created with relevant stakeholders.

Sharing findings and lessons learned

• Build key junctions into ongoing research efforts to share findings with key stakeholders, including communities – this is especially important where delays to publishing are anticipated.
• Carry out and publish concise outputs with key findings within 48 hours of a learning event or research study, so they can be fed back into programmes and maintain momentum – a longer and more polished report can always follow.
• Establish clear roles and responsibilities for documentation and report writing to avoid delays.
• Undertake informal immediate feedback of key recommendations and innovations following events/field research to policy and decision-makers.
• Be open to sharing and learning from both successes and failures, both are essential to successful adaptive programming.
• Consider usefulness/actionability of findings. Ensure recommendations are practical and achievable within existing constraints (time, money, etc.), so they can be easily fed into programmes and national systems and changes can take place.

Different tools and methods can be drawn on as part of the Rapid Action Learning methodology, for different purposes.

For example:

1. Immersive research.
2. RAL workshops (explored below in a mini case study).
3. Rapid Topic Explorations – drawing in academic and grey literature, key informant interviews, preliminary insights from on-going research on progress, as well as rapid and informal field investigations. An example would be the Handwashing Compendium for Low Resource Settings, compiled rapidly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
4. The unofficial visit, or debiasing:

Mini case study

Between 2014 – 2020, RAL workshops were co-convened by the Government of India, WSSCC (now UNOPS) and IDS – two at the national level, six at regional level, and three at district- level. These brought together almost exclusively government staff working on the SBM-G to share and learn from each other and plan for next steps.

The aims of these workshops were:

1. To provide national and sub-national level actors (state/province, county, districts, villages, etc.) with ideas and means to accelerate progress towards sustainable and equitable Open Defecation Free status.

2. To learn from successful experiences and to provide opportunities for sharing insights, innovations and successful practices, including methods, processes and approaches developed by peers in other districts.

3. To make these accessible for adoption and/or adaptation by other districts.

4. For area-wide teams to review practical lessons learnt and to integrate that learning into district-specific actions.

A practical and action-orientated four-page report was produced and disseminated two days immediately following each event.

Independent evaluations of the RAL workshops were commissioned, one by IDS and the other by WSSCC/UNOPS:

• The workshops ‘have shown great success in engaging state government officials and community leaders sharing information through the highly engaging “hunter-gatherer” activity and, most importantly, the development of achievable action plans. These have augmented the national Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin (SBM-G) to great effect’ (Murray and Majale 2019).
• The workshops ‘have demonstrated that through well facilitated participatory approaches, knowledge can be effectively shared between peers and are a strong mechanism for cross district learning. The learning that has been documented in the RAL workshop reports, clearly demonstrates that the approach is effective at identifying best practice and innovations.’

RAL workshops have now become a key component of UNOPS’s work on supporting the government of India’s Jal Jeevan Mission (Water Mission) in India. They have also been trialled by SLH and partners (WaterAid and UNICEF) in Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Cambodia.