Development through (em)power(ed) relationships Part 3

Shifting Towards Impact and Systems Change

Recently Tshikululu has been assisting some of its clients to invest in initiatives that drive more purposefully towards definable impact and even achieve systems change. These clients are not satisfied merely addressing symptoms when they could be tackling the underlying causes of the challenges society faces.

Expanding the Scope of Social Investment

We are excited to be broadening the scope of what social investment can entail in South Africa: from advising our clients on investments into the country’s first social impact bonds to driving policy change in early childhood development (ECD) through high-stakes partnerships with other donors (to name a few).

The Importance of Collaboration for Sustainable Impact

However, as with building a school, it is the collaboration between a range of different stakeholders that holds the promise of truly sustainable impact.

Academics and practitioners across the globe have been giving a lot of attention to the idea of collective impact over the past decade.

Collective Impact in Practice

Tshikululu has been very fortunate to help design and manage a few initiatives that we classify as collective impact; initiatives where we invite key stakeholders to gather behind a common objective, while “making the circle bigger” to meaningfully include others.

The Jala Peo Initiative: A Case Study

The Jala Peo Initiative, a project which Tshikululu assisted one of its clients in co-creating with the Department of Basic Education, is one such initiative. It has taken five years to do the ground work, lay the foundations and carefully build the social infrastructure to enable this multi-stakeholder collaboration to take effect. It is still early days, but the first shoots have broken through the soil and there is growing excitement for the future of this initiative.

Jala Peo (Sesotho for “plant the seed”) is about unlocking the resources (inputs, equipment, skills, knowledge and expertise) that are already in communities and directing these in a coordinated way to support schools in its precinct to establish and maintain school food gardens that are then used as outdoor learning laboratories.

Principles and Stakeholder Value in Jala Peo

The Jala Peo Initiative holds that:

every school is entitled to enjoy the quality learning benefits of using an outdoor learning lab
the resources for this are already in the local community;
a school food garden is not about farming for produce but about teaching learners practical knowledge; and
every stakeholder contributes and benefits—creating shared value across sectors.

In acting on behalf of one of our clients, we’ve played the role of influential champion, using our networks and relationships to secure agreements, convene stakeholders, establish forums and deploy coordination capacity across multiple districts.

Unlocking Collective Power for Systemic Change

The Jala Peo Initiative is already active in multiple districts and continues to expand. However, we are learning that beyond leveraging the collective power of social investors, there is a need to unlock the broader “power to act” within all stakeholders. Harnessing this shared agency is essential to achieving true collective impact and sustainable systems change.