Education Entrepreneur: Partnership Pitfalls

A partnership that did work, Ryan with Moses, a Global Youth Partnership for Africa peer educator in Namuwongo, Kampala, Uganda

This is the first post in a new column called "Education Entrepreneur," written by Ryan Pederson of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement

The community based organization seemed ideal for hosting a team of six motivated students for a summer of development work: A strong board of directors, several passionate staff, strong community connections, an office at the heart of Gulu, Uganda, and core competencies in many relevant development fields.

And yet a couple weeks in, hours of confusing talking-in-circles meetings under their belt, and an embarrassing experience of being asked to teach local Ugandans how to farm, our students realized that the partnership had turned out to be a complete flop. This organization's strong community connections were dozens of kilometers away. They had no clear mission, no projects for students to build on, and little capacity to start and sustain any newly developed projects.

Failed partnerships such as this one are common in student global engagement, and taught us at the Center for Global Engagement several lessons about what to look for in host organizations.

I am currently traveling through Uganda and India meeting with several community based organizations to select partners for the Northwestern Global Engagement Summer Institute. Our 60-100 students will work in teams of 6 with up to 17 host organizations in Argentina, India, and Uganda. Like most placements or partnerships, a few criteria are key to ensuring that students and organizations have a positive, value-added relationship.

Having learned from our early mistakes, I will be looking for the following:

1. Mission Specialization: Does the organization have a clear mission and activities?
2. Student Added Value: Does the type of activity have possibilities for students to add value?
3. Community Connections: Does the organization have deep connections where the students will work?
4. Organization Capacity: Are there several full time staff and ongoing programs that students can build upon?
5. Communication: Will the organization communicate well with students and program staff?

These characteristics are essential for a strong partnership that facilitates the realization of key goals of our program: students learning about development while enhancing what already exists in a way that impacts the community and builds the organization's long-term capacity.

In the world of global engagement education many, many student projects fall apart (or can't even start) because of poorly selected partnerships. It is not uncommon for the host organization and student interns to have widely differing conceptions of what the experience should/can be. Or for the host organization to be something completely different than what it pitched itself as-whether online, through brochures, or through a charming director's sales pitch. That's why the vetting process for partners is so important for us, as I can imagine it is in any other sector.