Strategy
Supras’ strategy is an operationalization of its Vision. For details on how the strategy is implemented, see the Profile. Regarding how the strategy is implemented, relates to and reflects organization and staffing, see Organization, Staff, and Consultant roster ... [more]
The approach
The strategy is built around an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to social analysis, knowledge management and strategic communication.
- Social analysis. Understood as a conceptual framework aimed at pointing towards specific aspects or parts of society in order to study them and provide guidance on, for example, poverty reduction in connection with projects and investment operations,
- Knowledge management. A structured approach to managing, producing, disseminating, analyzing and using relevant knowledge and information, increasingly made possible and facilitated by use of computers and ICTs, and
- Strategic communication. Amounts to ensuring that the correct knowledge gets to the correct stakeholder at the correct time and with the intended effect.
The integration of these three foci amounts to: (1) a means for assessing the situation in, for example, a project area, and (2) assessing and determining relevant and optimal strategic partnerships aimed at implementing interventions and reaching goals.
It is fundamental to our way of operating to collaborate closely with all relevant stakeholders in civil society, the public sector and the private sector. Following from Supras’ Vision, the local people — that is, the beneficiaries — is a key stakeholder category that needs to be approached and involved from the very beginning. Local people should come out of a development intervention not just with their lives and subsistence base at the same level as before the intervention, but should benefit from it.
A key element of the strategy is to locate and involve relevant capacity and expertise at the local level. It is, furthermore, to train local people wherever and whenever necessary. Supras’ approach to keeping in touch with people that have been hired on local short-term consultancies is to include them in a decentralized Organization, as it were, of local consultants and experts in various fields, and to involve them in operational activities whenever feasible (see Consultant roster).
The goals with the overall engagement is, on the one hand, increased participation and, on the other hand, capacity- and network-building. Underlying this engagement is a concern with achieving co-management of natural resources, inclusion, networking, sharing and transparency.
The tools
The tools and means employed include, but are not limited to: Information and Communication Technologies (including Internet and email) together with GIS and GPS, knowledge sharing and knowledge production, network analysis, participatory approaches, poverty and social impact analysis, social analysis (PSIA), social assessment, stakeholder analysis, and strategic communication.