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Assessing International Partnership: MSU Alliance for African Partnership
Jamie Monson, Ph.D. and Isaac Minde

*summarized from “Challenges of creating alliances across borders: midterm reflections from the Alliance for African partnership”

Michigan State University's Alliance for African Partnership, AAP, was founded in 2016 to identify the best practices of addressing global challenges through research when partnering with Africa.

The Alliance for African Partnership is a partnership between Michigan State University, community partners, stakeholder communities and nongovernmental organizations in Africa. The consortium consists of 11 members, 10 institutions from Africa and Michigan State University. The Alliance for African Partnership aims to build bridges, transform institutions and transform lives as stated in its three pillars. Its main focuses are equity, transparency, mutual respect and sustainability in research and community-engaged learning contexts.

In Jamie Monson's, Ph.D. workshop, Strategies for Connecting US/Africa Higher Institutions in the Field of Community-Engaged Learning, Monson reflected on three years of partnership with the MSU Alliance for African Partnership. Monson's workshop taught participants the importance of language, execution and critical assessment.

When Michigan State University launched the Alliance for African Partnership, the university contributed a significant amount of seed funding. The contribution led members to consider if the relationship was imbalanced according to Isaac Minde's and Monson's "Challenges of creating alliances across borders: midterm reflections from the Alliance for African partnership." The members considered the possibility of the partnership being too dependent on Michigan State University. This led members to review the definition of an ally as stated in the article. An ally is a social or political partnership that works towards a common goal, challenge or issue.

The Alliance for African Partnership members altered the definition of an ally for their mission. According to the article, AAP's definition of an ally is a member of the dominant and privileged society who works to dismantle oppression they would typically benefit from. The Alliance for African Partnership reflected on 18-month seed grant projects and the implementation of partnership-ethical principles and their new definition of an ally. The evaluation of the 18-month seed grants revealed partner-ship-ethical principles were not practiced by management nor researchers; however, the reason was not carelessness.

There were many transparency and time-related issues. Issues amongst management, funding delays, transparency in information and deadline extensions led to the compromise of principles. For researchers, many issues stemmed from not abiding by responsibility guidelines and delayed submission of required reports.

Though partnership-ethical principles were compromised, the seed projects were able to make many achievements such as peace-building, introducing youth to entrepreneurship and introducing employment skills. A university also developed new models for community engagement that attempts to create sustainable social, cultural and economically acceptable solutions according to the article. The reflection provided many lessons on partnership for the Alliance for African Partnership, mainly based on Isaac Minde's and Thomas Jayne's "Endeavoring to Nurture Partnership."

Four lessons The Alliance for African Partnership learned:

• Embracing partnership is a task that takes time, it doesn’t occur immediately
• Agreeing on a set of ethics takes time. As a result, AAP recognizes that some partners may have been reluctant to work
• Requiring experienced researchers with traditional research methods abide by a new way of research isn’t easy
• One’s mindset is a large factor in partnerships which can influence the adherence to ethics

To track ethics, the Alliance for African Partnership uses their M, E, and L, monitoring, evaluation and learning tool. The M, E, and L tool constantly question the progress of partnership related paradigm shifts they aim to enact as stated in the article. The M, E, and L tool is carried out by activity leads for each activity and is to be reported quarterly. Monitoring includes tracking the progress of alliances to see if objectives are met. If not, mid-course corrections occur. Evaluation helps with making observations of relevance, efficiency and sustainability. Learning is aimed towards implementers and management to include knowledge from the M and E components.

Besides the M, E, and L, learning tool the Alliance for African Partnership uses principle indicators to track adherence to ethics. The principle indicators are: mutual respect, mutual trust, accountability and responsibility, co-creation, mutual benefit and reciprocity, transparency, flexibility, multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary, sustainability, and equity.