Articles & Stories

Putting Needs First: the SERVIR Service Planning Approach

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SERVIR – a joint development initiative of NASA and USAID – connects ‘space to village’ by using Earth observation data collected by satellites to help solve development challenges in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. SERVIR improves local and regional capacity to provide tools, products, and services that empower decision makers to better address critical issues related to food security, water resources, natural disasters, land use, and extreme weather. Building on thirteen years of experience, SERVIR has grown in its geographical reach and has adapted its approach based on lessons learned. From these lessons, SERVIR identified a disconnect between cutting-edge technical products that were developed and the specific needs of users. SERVIR needed a way to encourage local communities and potential users to be active collaborators during the development and rollout of SERVIR’s innovative products.

Participants of Service Planning consultation
SERVIR-West Africa Service Planning consultation in Senegal 
Photo credit: USAID / SERVIR-WA  

To bridge this gap, SERVIR developed a service planning approach to shift the focus from products to comprehensive services that put the users’ needs first. SERVIR’s customizable services include decision-support products, tools, data sets, training, and capacity building. Service planning provides a framework for actively engaging stakeholders and end users starting from the design of the service to its release and adoption by the user. This approach to user engagement improves the quality of the services by addressing user feedback and builds sustainability into the services from the beginning. Because the model involves representatives from under-represented audiences – especially those marginalized by gender, geography, or access to technology – service planning is an inclusive process for creating and delivering customizable solutions.

SERVIR’s service planning approach is documented in the SERVIR service planning toolkit, a practical guide for designing geospatial information services that are oriented around users’ needs to achieve meaningful development impact. The toolkit contains four tools – consultation and needs assessment; stakeholder mapping; service design; and monitoring, evaluation and learning – which link to the lifecycle of SERVIR's services planning approach. The toolkit outlines the goals for each tool, an overview of how to use it, guidelines on best practices, relevant templates, and expected outputs. While the toolkit was designed for the SERVIR network, the service planning approach can be replicated or adapted by other GIS implementers working on inclusive stakeholder engagement and context-specific interventions. To this end, the toolkit also includes resources to help readers adapt the materials to their specific contexts.

SERVIR’s network of hubs adopted the service planning approach in June 2017, and SERVIR continues to learn from the practical applications of this approach. This inclusive model actively engages stakeholders, is responsive to user needs, and lays out a pathway to achieve impact and sustainability for each service. SERVIR is already seeing successes based on this approach. SERVIR-West Africa’s application of stakeholder mapping is helping the team identify new users to co-develop useful services. SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya is conducting more inclusive stakeholder engagement – going beyond government to consider other partners and users to support sustainability. For both SERVIR-Mekong and SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa, service planning helps articulate a vision for designing and delivering services that builds allies and demonstrates broader impact.

Access the Service Planning toolkit – or browse some of the products and tools developed through its application.