By Imo Silas Korshima
Last week I spent three days in Makurdi with partners, government officials and programme staff designing the next phase of the SPRiNG (Strengthening Peace and Resilience in Nigeria) programme. A lot was discussed across those three days, but one idea kept surfacing in different forms, in different sessions, from different voices: stop starting over.
In development work, new funding cycles have a way of quietly erasing what came before. New designs arrive, new frameworks get introduced, and communities that were carefully engaged find themselves re-engaged from scratch. The lessons from the field get filed into reports that few people read, and a lot of what actually worked disappears, not because it failed, but because the new cycle simply had no room for it. SPRiNG is trying to push back on that pattern, and the entire design logic for Year 3 was built around a single question: what has already taken root, and how do we grow it?
That sounds straightforward until you try to do it. Scaling something that worked is genuinely harder than designing something new, because an intervention rarely works in isolation. It works because of the relationships built around it, the local champions who believed in it, the specific tension it happened to address at exactly the right moment. Lift it out of that context and replicate it somewhere else without understanding those dynamics, and you might reproduce the activity while losing everything that gave it meaning.
What the workshop pushed partners to do was go back before going forward. Before designing a single new activity, the question on the table was whether the structures built in Year 1 were still standing on their own, whether trained community members were still applying what they had learned without the programme propping them up, and whether the small local innovations that never made it into formal reports were being captured before the people who knew about them moved on. That last point struck me. Institutional memory in this kind of work is fragile, and when phases end and staff change, a lot of practical knowledge simply walks out the door.
The most useful thing I took from Makurdi is that adaptive programming is less a methodology and more a habit of honesty. It requires being genuinely willing to sit with uncomfortable evidence, to ask whether your assumptions about what worked are based on data or on hope, and to let the answers actually reshape what you do next. The programmes that manage this well are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated frameworks. They are the ones where people in the room feel safe enough to say “that didn’t work as well as we thought” and where that admission leads somewhere productive rather than getting smoothed over in the final report. That willingness, more than any revised log frame or new workstream structure, is what the next phase of SPRiNG seemed to be reaching for. Whether implementation bears it out is another matter. But asking the right questions at the design stage is at least a credible place to start.