3 lessons on stakeholder consultation from the COVID-19 pandemic
What happens to an in-person, highly collaborative process when a pandemic shuts down global travel?
The original plan: In-person in Central Africa
A stakeholder consultation is a participatory process.
Active community engagement is critical to discovering bottlenecks in a given market and to understanding the role that regulations can play in overcoming them.
As part of our mandate to support regulators and policymakers in the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), we decided to engage in a stakeholder consultation to identify regulatory constraints to and opportunities for the expansion of Digital Financial Services (DFS) in the region.
By providing a platform for local DFS stakeholders to contribute their own ideas to advance their digital finance ecosystem, we also hoped to ensure early buy-in of our diagnostic findings and recommended policy options with the government, regional and national regulators, financial Institutions, mobile network operators, civil society organizations, donors and NGOs.
But by the time we were ready to fly off to Central Africa, the Covid-19 pandemic began to break out. As governments around the world started to shut their borders down, we quickly figure out a Plan B: go fully digital.
Plan B: Fully digital
We expected that conducting a stakeholder consultation in the midst of a global pandemic would be challenging.
But what we didn’t expect was how well this new format would work for us and for our partners.
Our consultation tools and processes adapted well to digital delivery
We’ve continued to provide consistent and systematic coverage of the issues that are important to advance financial inclusion in the CEMAC area
We’ve continued to engage stakeholders across the region — between April and September 2020, we’ve connected with more than 50 stakeholders across four CEMAC countries and we will continue the process in the two remaining CEMAC countries in October 2020
Here’s what we’ve learned along the way:
Three key lessons
1. Going digital saves time and money — and reduces our carbon footprint
An online consultation can prove far more effective than a field mission.
Leading an online consultation across four different markets enabled us to save time (as well as financial resources and Co2 emissions) by cutting on the time spent in hotels, planes and traffic jams (as we usually do during a field mission).
The online consultation also required less preparation time. We didn’t have to deal with all the logistical details and administrative burden associated with business trips. Obviously, some preparation was still required to schedule interviews, provide contextual and background information to stakeholders prior to the interviews and to follow-up afterwards.
Overall, we were more flexible with our time. As a matter of fact, we managed to fit more interviews during our week-long online consultation with Congolese DFS stakeholders than during our week-long field mission in Mauritania in December 2019.
2. Trust-building works remotely, too
It does not take a face-to-face meeting to build trust with an unknown stakeholder.
Travel restrictions prevented us from holding in person meetings with the policy-makers and regulators that the UNCDF Policy Accelerator was created to support. We knew that videoconference calls were not ideal to build trust, but they surely helped to do the trick, especially at a time of crisis.
We soon realized that when it comes to bilateral talks with the goal of gathering information and building partnerships, conference calls can prove as effective as face-to-face meetings. Following several video-conference calls and phone calls, we even agreed on a new partnership related to capacity-building and digital finance. We also engaged in very open conversations with private sector stakeholders who shared areas of concerns and possible solutions to advance digital finance in Central Africa.
One limitation to remote trust-building: Several regulators have warned us that the Public-Private Dialogue (the second phase of our stakeholder engagements) would need to happen in person. Public-Private Dialogues (PPD) are not only about building trust. PPD are also about harnessing collective intelligence. Its added value lies in the ability to bring together different perspectives from a wide array of stakeholders to share experiences, discuss issues, and come up with mutually agreed solutions to an improved regulatory framework. We can see how holding a remote PPD would not be ideal — but we’re thinking about how best we can approach this stage of stakeholder engagements under the circumstances.
3. Connectivity is not (necessarily) an issue
In 2014, the 3G coverage rate of the CEMAC region was 54% compared to a rate of 90% across the continent. The regional mobile penetration rates were also below the continent’s average of 50%.
With this in mind, we anticipated that connectivity issues might prove challenging to successfully complete the stakeholder consultation. We prepared alternative communications channels (phone, Zoom, WhatsApp, MS Teams, Skype) just in case we experienced issues with our preferred communication tool. In the end, these alternative means of communication were only used a handful of times.
And we found that despite busy schedule and the additional workload brought by the global pandemic, the people we reached out to were eager to discuss DFS, which is playing an important role in reducing the spread of COVID-19. It seems somehow appropriate that we were discussing digital financial services uses digital means.
Final takeaway
Like many public sector organizations, some of our standard practices — such as flying around the world for in-person meetings — were stuck in the 20th century. And they didn’t align well with the “digital transformations” we were promoting with our partners.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink the way we accelerate policies and regulations. As a result of our quick “digital transformation” to remote consultations, we are in a better position to support governments and central banks that are embarking on their own digital transformations of financial services.
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Authors
Alexis Ditkowsky
Olivia-Kelly Lonkeu