Documenting good practice

Making it Work is concerned with documenting evidence of good practice as a way to strengthen advocacy on disability issues.

To decide what is good practice you first need to establish some criteria. This is best done in collaboration with other organizations. The general principles of the CRPD and the article relevant to your topic will help provide a framework for this.

Some considerations for good practice criteria include:

• Innovative: does the practice demonstrate a new way of working on the topic / in the particular context?
• Inclusive: does the practice demonstrate inclusion of all people with disabilities (including women, girls, people with different types of impairment) – not only as beneficiaries but also in designing, implementing and monitoring actions? To what extent have DPOs been included in decision-making?
• Impact: does the practice have a positive impact on individuals and communities?
• Inspire: in what ways could this practice be replicated or ‘scaled up’?

» The objective of your research is to collect examples of good practice on a topic. This means good practices carried by a range of organizations and stakeholders - not only your own organization! Making it Work is not an exercise in self-promotion – but an analysis of how different stakeholders have engaged successfully on a topic. A multi-stakeholder review is quite different from one organization reviewing its own practice.

» Collaboration with other organizations / stakeholders will help to identify examples of good practice to be investigated.

» Depending on the scale of the project, field researchers can be recruited. This requires appropriate training, support and resources. 

» The number of practices to be collected will depend on the topic and the scale of the project.

» For each example of good practice it is important to interview as many stakeholders as possible, to ensure accuracy and a correct representation of events.

» Making it Work Toolkit 3 provides additional tools and resources for defining good practice criteria and methods collecting good practices, for example, standards for interviews, templates for writing up case studies etc.