Visualizing Your Network for Adaptive Program Decision Making

By Alexis Banks, Jennifer Himmelstein, and Rachel Dickinson

Social network analysis (SNA) is a powerful tool for understanding the systems of organizations and institutions in which your development work is embedded. It can be used to create interventions that are responsive to local needs and to measure systems change over time. But, what does SNA really look like in practice? In what ways could it be used to improve your work? Those are the questions we tackled in our recent MERL Tech session, Visualizing Your Network for Adaptive Program Decision Making. ACDI/VOCA and Root Change teamed up to introduce SNA, highlight examples from our work, and share some basic questions to help you get started with this approach.

SNA is the process of mapping and measuring relationships and information flows between people, groups, organizations, and more. Using key SNA metrics enables us to answer important questions about the systems where we work. Common SNA metrics include (learn more here):

• Reachability, which helps us determine if one actor, perhaps a local NGO, can access another actor, such as a local government;
• Distance, which is used to determine how many steps, or relationships, there are separating two actors;
• Degree centrality, which is used to understand the role that a single actor, such as an international NGO, plays in a system by looking at the number of connections with that organization;
• Betweenness, which enables us to identify brokers or “bridges” within networks by identifying actors that lie on the shortest path between others; and
• Change Over Time, which allows us to see how organizations and relationships within a system have evolved.

SNA in the Program Cycle

SNA can be used throughout the design, implementation, and evaluation phases of the program cycle.

Design: Teams at Root Change and ACDI/VOCA use SNA in the design phase of a program to identify initial partners and develop an early understanding of a system–how organizations do or do not work together, what barriers are preventing collaboration, and what strategies can be used to strengthen the system.

As part of the USAID Local Works program, Root Change worked with the USAID mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to launch a participatory network map that identified over 1,000 organizations working in community development in BiH, many of which had been previously unknown to the mission. It also provided the foundation for a dialogue with system actors about the challenges facing BiH civil society.

To inform project design, ACDI/VOCA’s Feed the Future Tanzania NAFAKA II Activity, funded by USAID conducted a network analysis to understand the networks associated with village based agricultural advisors (VBAAs)–what services they were offering to farmers already, which had the most linkages to rural actors, which actors were service as bottlenecks, and more. This helped the project identify which VBBA’s to work with through small grants and technical assistance (e.g. key actors), and what additional linkages needed to be built between VBAAs and other types of actors.

Implementation: We also use SNA throughout program implementation to monitor system growth, increase collaboration, and inform learning and program design adaptation. ACDI/VOCA’s USAID/Honduras Transforming Market Systems Activity uses network analysis as a tool to track business relationships created through primary partners. For example, one such primary partner is the Honduran chamber of tourism who facilitates business relationships through group training workshops and other types of technical assistance. They can then follow up on these new relationships to gather data on indirect outcomes (e.g. jobs created, sales and more).

Root Change used SNA throughout implementation of the USAID funded Strengthening Advocacy and Civic Engagement (SACE) program in Nigeria. Over five years, more than 1,300 organizations and 2,000 relationships across 17 advocacy issue areas were identified and tracked. Nigerian organizations came together every six months to update the map and use it to form meaningful partnerships, coordinate advocacy strategies, and hold the government accountable.

Evaluating Impact: Finally, our organizations use SNA to measure results at the mid-term or end of project implementation. In Kenya, Root Change developed the capacity of Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) staff to carry out a baseline, and later an end-of-project network analysis of the relationships between youth and organizations providing employment, education, and entrepreneurship support. The latter analysis enabled AKF to evaluate growth in the network and the extent to which gaps identified in the baseline had been addressed.

The Feed The Future Ghana Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement II (ADVACNE II) Project, implemented by ACDI/VOCA and funded by USAID, leveraged existing database data to demonstrate the outgrower business networks that were established as a result of the project. This was an important way of demonstrating one of ADVANCE II’s major outcomes–creating a network of private service providers that serve as resources for inputs, financing, and training, as well as hubs for aggregating crops for sales.

Approaches to SNA
There are a plethora of tools to help you incorporate SNA in your work. These range from bespoke software custom built for each organization, to free, open source applications.

Root Change uses Pando, a web-based, participatory tool that uses relationship surveys to generate real-time network maps that use basic SNA metrics. ACDI/VOCA, on the other hand, uses unique identifiers for individuals and organizations in its routine monitoring and evaluation processes to track relational information for these actors (e.g. cascaded trainings, financing given, farmers’ sales to a buyer, etc.) and an in-house SNA tool.

Applying SNA to Your Work
What do you think? We hope we’ve piqued your interest! Using the examples above, take some time to consider ways that SNA could be embedded into your work at the design, implementation, or evaluation stage of your work using this worksheet. If you get stuck, feel free to reach out (Alexis Banks, abanks@rootchange.org; Rachel Dickinson, rdickinson@rootchange.org; Jennifer Himmelstein, JHimmelstein@acdivoca.org)!