Scaling Up ~ Sharing Experience ~ Tapping Local Knowledge ~ Creating Sums Greater than the Parts ~ Replicating Success. The international development community has pursued these goals for decades with a lack of visible impact, and not for want of trying.

Why have these goals been so elusive? Perhaps because most efforts to reach them have been designed and orchestrated from the top down. This blog is different. We started in the field, where practitioners are searching for practical knowledge, seeking new ways to collaborate, and testing new approaches, and are building the conversation from there.

Our goal in this demand=driven forum is to create connective tissue across the development ecosystem so that its full potential can be realized. We empower practitioners through our mission of building and strengthening online and offline knowledge networks in ways that tap their knowledge, preserve it, and put it to practical use.

This site is a hub for knowledge sharing.  The blogs that you see here are complemented by an online Q&A platform that enables users to post questions and answers, tag topics, rate content, and collaborate to solve problems. The site is democratic in spirit and user-driven. Content currently on the site encompasses sustainable agriculture, food security, climate change and natural resource management, and will be expanded to cover related themes that influence development practice as the community demands. InfoSpring also has a built-in translation feature for 60 languages. Click here to open InfoSpring.

Country networks are designed to extend the reach of this conversation to practitioners who work primarily or exclusively offline. Important knowledge related to development program design, implementation and evaluation typically remains in the field.  We hope to amplify the voices from the field and bring this valuable asset to the global development practitioner community.   Our first country network was formed in Liberia, and a second one is being launched in Kenya.  Country networks activities will take shape around informal, open-invitation practitioner sessions to build person-to-person networks with a culture of candor, shared learning, and practical problem solving. Visit our the country chapter page to see read blogs and reports on these events, and interact with practitioners in the field.


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December Newsletter: New Home for InfoSpring

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Our December newsletter is the final one to be published by the Development Practitioners Forum.  Earlier this year, acknowledging the very difficult fund raising environment, the Forum’s board of directors concluded that the initiatives that we have launched over the past two years could best be sustained on  different organizational platforms.

We are very pleased to announce that our community Q&A site, InfoSpring, has a new home at the Earth Institute at Columbia University.   The Earth Institute and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) are the hub for the innovative Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) program, a practice-orientated development degree supported by the MacArthur Foundation.    With its interdisciplinary focus and global network of institutions, faculty and students at 22 universities around the world, the MDP program will be able to expand and enrich the InfoSpring community.    Read about it here: Forum Final Newsletter

This devprac.org site will continue to post blogs from development practitioners who are committed to the principles of peer-to-peer learning and more efficient knowledge exchange on the front lines.  You’ll find posts from practitioner meetups across rural Liberia on the Liberia Network page.  A second practitioner network is taking shape in Kenya, and preliminary reports from the team who are leading it appear on the Kenya Network page.

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