When to use the Relationship Framework

The Relationship Framework has real power when it helps guide a conversation among people. Not only does it show relationships in a context, in its use it helps foster relationships in a team as well.

Use it for team building by arriving at a common understanding of the context and the intervention’s role within it. Build a common language.

Use it for explaining the interaction of an intervention on a context. It is a very good training tool for this purpose.

The Relationship Framework is an excellent planning tool and an excellent evaluation tool. Teams can use the Relationship Framework to keep a record of the changes in the context and how they thought through the impacts of their intervention. This makes the learning they underwent accessible to others and makes evaluation significantly easier.

Put it up on the wall as a poster. Either use it to start conversations, or use the poster as a real-time monitoring tool out where everybody in your office can see it.

The Relationship Framework is a descriptive tool

The Framework is NOT prescriptive. It does not tell you what to do. It is a descriptive tool that:

identifies the categories of information that have been found through experience to be important for understanding how interventions affect contexts and conflict
organizes these categories in a visual way that highlights actual and potential relationships
helps us predict the impacts of different programming decisions.

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