Our Partnerships Initiative

A core priority of the Internews 2025 Strategy is to ensure that Internews has a trust-based partnership with organizations in the communities we serve. To do this, we make sure to listen to our partners through collecting data on our partnerships, conducting feedback surveys, and creating tools, benchmarks, and collaborative initiatives with our partners to further improve our performance.

Partnerships’ Values:

• Equitable, Participatory, and Sustainable Partnerships: Internews as an organization prioritizes local leadership, knowledge, and expertise. We understand that working jointly with partners strengthens the impact and effectiveness of our development goals. Internews creates mechanisms and systems which involve Partners throughout the program cycle, we also endorse the spirit of localization in which capacity strengthening be viewed as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In addition, we concur that local civil society must determine their own objectives, that networked sharing of expertise and experience be bolstered as an alternative to top-down technical training from those less familiar with the environment, and that solutions be tailored to context. This, in return, strongly responds to the sustainability and self-reliance of local actors to continue to thrive beyond their contractual relationship with us.
• Transparent and Accountable Partnerships: The foundation of a strong partnership is transparency and openness for all stakeholders to respond to criticism or feedback, whether positive or negative. Internews values listening to its partners and will work on creating the necessary communication channels to allow for that to happen, smoothly, and anonymously. We expect the same from our Partners as we understand that we all have the same end-goal in mind – which is to do our best work and to improve our operations when we can. Internews equally welcomes failures as much as wins, as without failures, exists no improvement.
• Inclusive and Respectable Partnerships: Having a trust- and respect-based relationship with our partners is the cornerstone of a smooth working and personal relationship, which ensures higher effectiveness and impact of our projects and the efficient use of our time and resources. At Internews, the same values of Belonging Dignity and Justice adopted internally within the organization are adopted with our partners.

Listening and Learning – Biannual Feedback Survey

To better understand our partners’ experience working with Internews, we started conducting an biannual survey in early 2020 that was distributed to all organizations that receive Internews funding. Our goal was to better understand our partners’ experience working with Internews and how we can best serve their needs. Our 2022 survey found that 93.1% of our partners responded with Yes when asked if Internews staff were respectful to them and their staff, 45.03% and 39.77% responded with Strongly Agree and Agree, respectively, when asked if they felt encouraged to provide feedback and 40.35% and 31.58% responded with Strongly Agree and Agree respectively, when asked if their feedback was incorporated into the project.