Strategic planning for organisations in international development

How do you feel about strategic planning? Does it conjure images of endless meetings, unreadable jargon filled documents left on a shelf and never used? Many small organisations operate from project to project and evolve their planning as they go. It can be useful to pause and reflect on what you’ve achieved, and what you would like to do in the future, and why. This is the essence of a strategic plan.

Strategic planning is about making decisions about how you as an organisation define your goals and about how you navigate your organisational path to that destination. It helps you make decisions about what you do and don’t do, and how you do it. It helps you to target your resources more effectively and more sustainably and helps you to know when you’ve achieved your goals and how you exit in the best way for the communities you work with.

At Hub Cymru Africa we can support you with this process through our enhanced development support programme. You can contact us at advice@hubcymruafrica.wales and we can work through this process with you and your partner(s).

You can also use the following resources to find out more about strategic planning and to work through this process, as an organisation and partnership, considering power dynamics and using an anti-racist approach.

This toolkit, written by Rick James, is a concise guide to strategic planning intended specifically for use by small non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

There are links to tools such as PESTLE and SWOT analysis, stakeholder analysis.

These are some examples of prompt questions you could use to gain feedback from your partner as input into a strategic plan/review.

This toolkit, written by Lucy Morris, is a concise guide to exiting / transitioning from international partnerships, intended specifically for use by small non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

This strategic plan template is appropriate when:

• You are doing a strategic plan for a small or medium size organisation.
• Your organisation doesn’t have a fixed strategic plan process or template.

The draft guide seeks to support international organisations of varying sizes based in higher-income countries, in partnership with colleagues from around the world, to shift their practice and use of power to become more locally led.

The sections on values and culture, and purpose and strategy are particularly relevant to strategic planning.

This tool helps you to make power dynamics in your partnerships more visible. This new version is ready to help your partnerships identify imbalances in decision-making power and opportunities to shift power.