The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Jordan country office has been on a mission to transform how we approach development projects. With the Portfolio Initiation Framework (PIF), we aim to accelerate the implementation of the Strategic Plan 2022-2025, launch the Country Programme Document 2023 - 2028, and global organisational shift towards a portfolio-based approach.

In this era of change and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to address sustainable development challenges holistically and systematically. Portfolio-based approach anchored in innovation presents an opportunity for UNDP to gain a deeper understanding of the local problem space and work with stakeholders to co-create a portfolio of solutions that generate learning on a specific theme. Ideally, these solutions would include existing programme projects, pilots of solutions from other contexts adapted to local needs, and prototypes of solutions that have never been tested anywhere. These prototypes are key in exploring solutions that may not have been considered before and so allow for breakthrough innovations. 

PIF is a global corporate investment from UNDP, which was awarded to 15 country offices to learn and build a capacity in designing portfolios. UNDP Jordan picked food systems as a theme for PIF, which was planned to run between August 2022 and February 2023. The Accelerator Lab is part of the coordinators’ team who is managing the project. In the past couple of months, in addition to contributing to the project work plan and designing and facilitating workshops, the Lab managed the deep listening and mapping of past and existing actions related to food systems in collaboration with the country office and consultants working on the project. 

The deep listening consisted of three sub-activities: interviews with internal team members to capture their understanding of food systems and what it would mean to Jordan, interviews with 50 stakeholders from around Jordan about their roles within the food systems, and radio mining of talk show in a local radio station. The mapping of past and existing actions entailed gathering and visualising information on impactful work in Jordan related to food systems, both work done by UNDP and other entities. Using an online systems mapping tool, Kumu, we visualised the past and existing actions and clustered them in various ways with details on the type of entity, geographical and impact scope, location, online resources, sectors, and relation to the 2021 UN Food Summit Action Tracks.

The coordinator’s team and one of the consultants ran a workshop in which they collectively discussed the findings of the deep listening and mapping of past and existing actions with a bigger team of UNDP Jordan country office staff. More details about the process and findings will be released in another blog. In the meantime, the Accelerator Lab acknowledges how challenging the transition from project-based to portfolio-based work can be, and this can be observed from the staff’s hesitation to change the way they work and operate, but we have complete confidence that the team at UNDP is up to the task. The workshop helped bring more clarity about how the team’s current practices are compared to aspired portfolio approach. Although a solid pathway to practically transition to a portfolio-based approach will continue to be an ongoing mission that requires a deeper understanding of the workflow,  dedication of all UNDP teams, and translation of the learnings into actions.