At the 2024 EU-CORD General Assembly, the Faith in Action community invited members to participate in a new initiative to explore how our shared partnership principles are being lived out in practice. Five members—Mission East, Woord en Daad, Dorcas, Help a Child, and Cord—stepped up to the challenge, leading the way in a process designed to listen to local partners and generate insights that could benefit the whole network.
Over 100 national partners across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East participated, sharing feedback on transparency, decision-making, financial collaboration, and mutual accountability. The survey was made available in five languages, helping to facilitate partners’ engagement in ways that reflected their linguistic and cultural contexts.
Responding partners represented a diverse group, including national NGOS, community-based organisations, and long-standing strategic alliances. They brought various perspectives based on different operating environments and organisational sizes. The survey combined quantitative scoring across key partnership dimensions with qualitative narrative responses, offering space for structured assessment and open reflection.
The process generated individual reports for each participating member and has now concluded with a final Benchmark Report synthesising key findings across the group and identifying opportunities for peer-learning.
What are we learning?
The feedback revealed a strong relational foundation across partnerships, characterised by trust, shared purpose, and a genuine commitment to accompaniment. At the same time, partners called for:
- Clearer communication around roles and decision-making
- More structured approaches to capacity strengthening
- Greater transparency in budgeting and financial planning
- More intentional learning and reflection mechanisms within partnerships
Refining our methods as we learn
Designing a methodology that reflects the complexity of partnership was not without its challenges. Survey questions aimed to explore sensitive dynamics, particularly around power, influence, and decision-making, which required careful wording to ensure that partners felt safe and could respond openly. Translation into multiple languages added another layer of complexity, as subtle nuances of meaning and tone were sometimes difficult to maintain across different cultural and linguistic contexts.
Another important learning point was the challenge of meaningfully engaging with the faith dimension of partnership in contexts where religion is politically or socially sensitive. While faith remains central to many EU-CORD members’ identity and motivation, partners highlighted the need for care in framing these discussions.
These challenges became valuable in their own right, reminding us that listening well requires methodologically sound, culturally aware, and relationally sensitive tools and processes.
Looking ahead
This initiative has shown the unique value of EU-CORD as a space for collective reflection and mutual learning. By coming together, members could design a shared approach, generate meaningful data, and learn from each other’s experiences—something that would have been harder to achieve in isolation.
As we move forward, the findings raise important questions about how the network can support continued joint learning and whether deeper collaboration is needed to address the areas identified.
We’re deeply grateful to the five members who led this process and especially to the partners who generously shared their time and feedback.
From the Secretariat’s perspective, this process reinforces that there is always more we can do together—more to learn, share, and leverage across the network. Partnership takes many forms, and as a network, we continue to explore and live out that commitment in new and meaningful ways.
