Tips
Turning principles into practice, here’s what effective adaptation can look like for funders, technical assistance providers, practitioners, and researchers.
For Funders
Provide long-term, flexible funding
Quality adaptation takes time — to learn and unlearn, build trust, and refine through iteration.
Invest in local capacity and ownership
Support organisations in strengthening their own expertise while enabling communities to lead.
Promote adherence to core components
Maintain essential programme elements while allowing contextual changes that strengthen relevance and impact.
Encourage experimentation
Create space for innovation, recognising that missteps and ‘failures’ are part of effective adaptation.
Prioritise technical assistance (TA)
Support TA, ideally from originators, to ensure quality, fidelity, learning uptake, and ethical implementation.
For Technical Assistance Providers
Coach beyond content
Help staff build skills in reflection, power analysis, and problem solving to navigate complex adaptation challenges.
Provide tools for documentation
Offer simple, practical tools to track adaptations in real time, capturing learning and changes as they happen.
Facilitate iterative learning
Enable ongoing reflection, monitoring, and feedback loops so practitioners can adapt and course-correct based on community needs.
Share experiences
Promote cross-learning to identify gaps, strengthen practice, and drive continuous improvement.
For Practitioners
Engage communities as co-creators
Involve community members throughout the adaptation journey, sharing decision-making, valuing their expertise and efforts, and ensuring their costs (transport, materials, etc) are covered.
Adapt delivery, not just content
Tailor delivery methods to community realities while maintaining programme fidelity.
Streamline content
Avoid overloading adapted programmes with new issues or components. Any additions should complement and align with the core content.
Practice regular reflection
Model self-reflection and support teams and community activists to regularly review adaptation decisions against core principles, context, biases, and community feedback to strengthen effective adaptation and prevent harmful compromises.
Monitor unintended consequences
Identify potential risks that could arise from adaptations and act quickly to mitigate them.
For Researchers
Document the adaptation process
Capture both the process and outcomes to strengthen learning.
Bridge research and practice
Work closely with practitioners to ensure methods, key questions, and processes align with programme priorities and values.
Engage in regular critical reflection
Analyse data, unpack learning and implementation experiences, and create forums for shared discussions among all stakeholders to support quality adaptation.
Uphold good practice
Center community and practitioner voices throughout research for adaptation.
Share findings accessibly
Translate research into timely, practical insights that communities and practitioners can use to strengthen their work.