Peer Exchanges

Why peer exchanges?

1. Peer exchanges promote opportunities for horizontal learning. Participating organizations are able to identify weaknesses, learning priorities, etc., and this learning is done horizontally in the field, by the people who live the issues every day and who are the real experts.
2. They are an opportunity to honor grassroots innovations and to collectively strategize how these innovations can be replicated and owned by the innovators.
3. Because many organizations are run by volunteers, the work is frequently undervalued. Peer exchanges are a way for participants to talk about their work in a way that affirms and reinforces its true value.
4. Peer exchanges help participants share best practices.
5. Evaluations carried out by peers often hold more water than evaluations done by external people.
6. Peer-to-peer capacity building can be more effective and less costly than capacity building led by outside ÒexpertsÓ.
7. Peer exchanges help to foster movement building and the sharing of advocacy strategies.

Some examples of peer exchanges convened by American Jewish World Service

Pfizer Exchange: Done between groups in Ghana, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Kenya, the focus was on best practices for home-based care and peer-led prevention programs.

Positive outcomes:

1. Each group is now integrating working with traditional healers in their programs.
2. A Christian organization involved in the exchange identified major gap of not working with traditional healers, and convinced their board to work with them.
3. Home-Care Alliance, advocating at the World Bank, UNDP, UNGASS, Toronto about more targeted support and increased funds for non-formal health sector in Africa.

Tsunami Exchanges: Organizations in India convened to share best practices in disaster preparedness and in monitoring government distribution of aid to ensure it was equitable and didn't pass over marginalized groups like Dalits.

Positive outcomes:

1. One organization, Sanghamitra, had put in place disaster management practices pre-tsunami and they managed to save many lives and jump-start the relief efforts immediately. All AJWS grantees now have learned and adapted this strategy and have used it effectively, for example in floods last March in India.
2. Locally appropriate psychosocial support and trauma counseling strategies have been adopted by all AJWS tsunami grantees. Ineffective trainings by international NGOs have now been abandoned in favor of the locally constructed strategies.

ICAS: This exchange involved six campesino organizations that met over two years, from Yucatan, Chiapas, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. These groups met to share their experiences as campesino organizations and also to work towards forming a network of campesino organizations. The vision became a way to share experiences, plan actions, become more democratic in their decision-making processes, and start to search for funding together.

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