Scaling Up Nutrition Civil Society Network

What is a Learning Route?

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A Learning Route is a capacity building tool, developed by Procasur Corporation, designed as a facilitated planned journey with specific learning objectives. A LR is an on-going peer-to-peer training process that makes room for discussion, analysis and reflection, while encouraging an active and mutual knowledge exchange between participants and their hosts.

The ultimate aim is to develop the ability of the Learning Route’s participants to identify potentially useful innovations that can be adapted and then applied in the framework of their organizations in their own country.

The Learning Route’s methodology has been tested, adapted and renewed since 1996, through a long-term partnership between Procasur, IFAD and other international organizations. The Learning Route methodology has been used in more than 35 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, involving over 3000 development practitioners.

Main steps of the learning route

1. Identifying and selecting the host country experiences that will be documented. An experience is relevant when it shows evidence of the use of good practice and/or innovation that has proved successful in addressing local challenges and in improving local people’s livelihoods/ nutrition.

2. Systematization/documentation of these experiences. The aim of this is to capture the process (the how, who, what) to enable other people to adopt and scale up these successes. The process of systematization aims to:

• identify and analyze the key of success of the experience, its good practices and innovations

• extract lessons that can be applied for scaling-up the experience to other similar contexts

• facilitate appropriation of the learning by the actors of the experience and enhance their ability to share their knowledge.

3. Identifying champions. People who are successful in their own work are trained to become capacity builders (‘Champions’), who use their own experiences as the source of training.

4. Learning visit: representatives from at least 7 CSAs from will join each learning exchange. The learning exchange develops as a journey across different experiences and through meeting various stakeholders and trainers. It ends with the drafting of an action plan to implement/test some of the learning acquired during the event.  

5. Follow up and on-going support. Participants are supported to draw on their learning, to share their learning with others, and to implement their action plans.