Learning in international development projects: Insights from a coordinating agency

International development projects involving Finnish higher education institutions (HEIs) take place in a complex transnational context. While funding primarily comes from Finland or other Northern sources, the activities mostly take place in the Global South. Project implementation and reporting require extensive cross-continental information exchange and effective knowledge sharing. Most importantly, as the projects aim to improve practices or foster other changes, all key actors need to learn new things.

This article focuses on knowledge and learning in the context of an international (North-South) development cooperation programme for HEIs funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. First, it investigates what kind of knowledge is needed in project implementation and how this knowledge is collected and used. Second, it investigates what kind of learning takes place in project context and how.

The article draws on interviews conducted with staff members from Jamk’s School of Professional Teacher Education (SPTE), which has served as the coordinating agency for three four-year higher education development projects during 2020–2024. Through these roles, Jamk has accumulated substantial experience in project implementation and management in this context. Moreover, as a teacher education institution, it is also an expert organization in the field of learning. For these reasons, it is interesting to examine how experienced project actors at Jamk conceptualize knowledge and learning within a project context like this.

At the same time, relying exclusively on interview data from Jamk-affiliated participants constitutes a clear limitation. A more comprehensive understanding of knowledge production and learning in a broader project context would also require perspectives from the Southern partners institutions. Because incorporating these viewpoints was not possible within the scope of the present article, this limitation should be borne in mind when interpreting the findings that follow.

Context

The context of this article is the HEI ICI programme (2020–2024) that aimed to improve institutional practices in the Global South in a set-up where the better-resourced Finnish higher education institutions collaborate with their Southern partners to benefit the latter ( Finnish National Agency for Education, 2025a). The two evaluations of this programme show that it succeeded very well in contributing to the intended outcomes of the programme and to Finland’s overall development goals (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2025b; Mayer et al., 2025).

The HEI ICI programme was funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland within the framework of Finland’s Development Policy (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, 2021). The funding was part of Finland’s official development funding, implying that the collaboration is primarily supposed to benefit the Southern partners. As OECD (2024) puts it: “Official Development Assistance (ODA) is government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries.” At the same time, experience shows that even the Northern partners benefit from development projects in terms of funding (see Kohtamäki & Boguslawski, 2025) and by increased staff expertise, strengthened capacity for international project management, visibility and reputation (Mayer et al., 2025, pp. 62–63).

The HEI ICI Programme document (Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Finnish National Agency for Education, 2019) places the programme under the framework of Finland’s development policy. It particularly emphasizes five aspects: results-based management (RBD), a human rights-based approach (HRBA), cross-cutting objectives, capacity building, and anti-corruption strategy combined with clear guidelines for project management and funding. This gives the Finnish HEI acting as the coordinating agency the task of coordinating the implementation of the project and ensuring planned outcomes for the benefit of the Southern partners while being accountable to the funding agency and complying to the reporting requirements.

In this article, I aim to understand how Jamk’s School of Professional Teacher Education as an experienced coordinating agency deals with its role. How do members of Jamk project staff collect information and produce knowledge to make informed decisions about project implementation? What kind of knowledge do they find most important and how do they define learning in this context? I hope that sharing this understanding and discussion in this article will help current and future project implementers perform better.

Jamk’s collaboration projects and the research data

The inspiration for this article came from the realization that Jamk has, in the Finnish context, exceptionally strong experience in collaboration with higher education institutions in the Global South. In concrete terms, Jamk’s School of Professional Teacher Education coordinated three HEI ICI projects during 2020–2024 in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nepal, which was more than any other Finnish HEI. These three HEI ICI projects were the following:

• In Ethiopia, the main objective of the Capacity Building for Modernizing TVET Pedagogy in Ethiopia (MOPEDE) project was to improve and modernize the accessibility and quality of Vocational Education and Training (VET) teacher education. This was done by institutionalizing and integrating e-learning into curricula, updating teaching and learning methods, and promoting student-centered pedagogy. (Jamk University of Applied Sciences., n.d.-b.)
• In Mozambique, the main aim of the Theory-Practice Balance in Teacher Education (TEPATE) project was to develop and deliver teacher education that provides teacher trainees with better skills to apply learner-centered pedagogy in practice. This was done by staff capacity building, collaborative development of study modules and teaching practice development. (Jamk University of Applied Sciences., n.d.-c.)
• In Nepal, the focus of the Developing Pedagogy for 21st Century Skills Nepal project was on strengthening the capacity of higher education to enhance equal access to education through digital learning opportunities. This was done by curriculum and module design as well as staff training. (Jamk University of Applied Sciences., n.d.-a.)

The empirical part of this article consists of five interviews conducted with Jamk’s project managers and project experts involved in the three HEI ICI projects described above. I obtained a research permit from Jamk, and all participants provided informed consent for the use of their interview data in addressing the research questions. I conducted the 50–90-minute interviews online in August 2024. All interviews were recorded and transcribed using Microsoft Teams, after which I manually checked the accuracy of each transcription.

The interview invitations outlined key topics such as monitoring and evaluation practices, role-specific information needs, and the meaning of learning in this context. All interviews included the main topics, but the discussions also took very different paths. Thus, the more specific issues covered were quite different from one interview to another. This made the material rich in the sense that new interviewees could bring new aspects and dimensions to the overall questions.

When all interviews were done, I read the data carefully and in an open manner with the intention of finding emerging topics in the data instead of analyzing the data through ready-made categories. With this open reading as a background, I decided to focus on two main questions that the data help to understand better. The first question deals with the types and uses of information and knowledge needed in project implementation. The second question takes us deeper into learning in an international project context.

The interviews constitute the main data of this article. However, in the discussion, I also draw from literature as well as from my personal experiences as an actor both in one of the three HEI ICI projects, TEPATE, and as a project manager of its successor TIPOTE (see Jamk University of Applied Sciences, 2025).

Project implementation requires multiple types of knowledge

The interview data includes many descriptions of various needs for getting information from the partner agencies (see Table 1). Looking at these, first, we can see that they reflect different types of knowledge needed in project implementation: administrative knowledge (including administrative information), expert knowledge, and tacit knowledge. Second, and somewhat intertwined with the previous, I found three different uses for the knowledge: reporting “out” to the funding agency and Jamk HQ, managing and improving project implementation, and learning to collaborate in the subject matter and with the specific partners. In the following section, I will describe these results in more detail.

Table 1: Types and uses of information and knowledge needed for project implementation.

	Administrative information	Administrative knowledge	Expert knowledge	Tacit knowledge
Reporting out	x	x
Managing the project	x	x	x
Learning to work in the project environment and collaborate		x	x	x

Administrative information refers mainly to numeric information: use of working hours, budget spending, number of training sessions and participants, etc. This type of information is relevant for reporting project spending, to fill in quantitative indicator matrices, and to report the use of funds. It is collected by requiring structured reports (narrative & financial) from the Southern partners, by discussing the details in meetings and bilateral discussions, and during field trips.

Collecting administrative information is at the heart of a project coordinator’s tasks. However, the priority and relevance of this information can sometimes be hard to understand for other project actors that are more focused on the content of the project and not directly accountable for the funds received from a Finnish government agency. For the coordinating agency, however, it is crucial to be able to meet the reporting requirements of both the funding agency and Jamk as the host institution and to ensure that the project is on the right track of implementation.

Administrative information consists mainly of numbers. With administrative knowledge, I refer to the ambition to also understand what lies behind these figures such as: why there are fewer working hours or less budget spending in one month compared to the next, who the participants of the training session were and how they were selected. Enriching the administrative information by this kind of understanding, i.e. learning to interpret the numbers, is important for the project coordinator to understand what is really going on in the project, as illustrated in one interview:

To illustrate the need to collect and share knowledge focusing on the contents of the project, the concept of expert knowledge is used. It captures knowledge about the topical areas that are being developed in the project: teacher education, curriculum development, course design, digital pedagogy, etc. In the interview data, this knowledge was rarely expressed in a universal sense as “facts”. Rather, the interviewees discussed it in terms of deepening understanding of how this kind of knowledge is interpreted and applied by various actors. The observed differences could relate to cultural, contextual, or position-based interpretations of an expert area, influencing how expertise can be gained and applied in the project context. For example, this could refer to the need to understand how a quality framework for digital learning or pedagogical principles can be put in use and what kind of procedures need to be followed in the Southern institution or what kind of obstacles can be identified when applying it. Different people in various positions have different perspectives on these questions in any organization, but cultural and contextual differences and physical distance in international project contexts give an additional twist to this.

A third type of knowledge appearing in the data is tacit knowledge. This refers mostly to cultural, organizational, and personal practices and behavioral patterns that may explain different priorities or delays in project implementation or cause misunderstandings but are difficult to put a finger on or discuss openly. It can be intertwined with both administrative and expert knowledge but appears also separately from them. Examples include issues related to informal decision-making mechanisms, hierarchies, political or power relations between people, various sources of income and salary formation, etc.

Expert knowledge and tacit knowledge can be invaluable for understanding what lies under the numbers of administrative knowledge. They can help overcome challenges arising, for example, from not understanding each other properly. Languages do not translate directly, and it can take a long time before the partners realize that they understand some concepts differently. In one of the three projects, for example, it took until the last year of project implementation to realize that when talking about “on-the-job teacher education”, the Finns referred to continuing teacher training, whereas the Southern partners used it to describe initial teacher education for people who had started their teaching work already and studied for the first teacher certification while working.

Acquiring these different types of knowledge requires different approaches. Administrative information and knowledge can be collected by requiring reports from all partners or by discussing the data in meetings, even though this can be challenging, as developing a shared understanding of their relevance is not always easy. Still, they are the main source of information for annual reports to the Finnish agencies – both to Jamk and the funding agency. On the other hand, expert knowledge and especially tacit knowledge are less tangible and very difficult to collect in questionnaires or other quantifiable forms. Using various facilitation methods to collect feedback can help to capture at least expert knowledge to some extent. However, both expert and tacit knowledge are mostly shared in informal discussions with people you have learned to know personally and with whom you share a good level of trust. These relationships do not develop without time spent together by project staff from all partner institutions.

Long- and short-term learning through learning activities

Extensive learning takes place in HEI ICI projects (see Table 2). Much of this learning is embedded in the project objectives and supported by explicit activities: First, individuals in the South are targeted by training, mentoring, study tours, and experiential learning opportunities such as trials and experiments. Second, learning at the individual level is translated into organizational learning within the Southern HEIs through the development and dissemination of new methods and tools, the production of educational materials, course plans, modules, and curricula, as well as the publication of guidebooks and articles. Third, to facilitate wider sharing, both internal training sessions and larger dissemination events are organized for colleagues, other HEIs, ministries, NGOs, and additional stakeholders in the South. All these forms of learning are essential, relevant and crucial as project outcomes.

Table 2: Learning in the HEI ICI project context.

Who learns?	Why is learning needed?
Individual South	Quality project implementation, Collaboration skills, e.g. language
Organization South	Key project objective
Other stakeholders in the South (broader context)	Impact objective
Project organization	Quality project implementation
Individual North	Quality project implementation
Organization North	Quality project implementation, Getting experience to succeed in other projects
How and when does learning happen?
- Training, guidance, mentoring, study tours, experiential learning and other activities specifically aiming to train & learn - Co-creation - Feedback (of training activities, products, collaboration) - Self-evaluation (individual / project level) - Report writing - Internal evaluation - External evaluation.

While the explicit learning objectives described in the project plans aim to contribute to the long-term relevance of the project, there are also some more temporary learning needs. To succeed in quality project implementation, substantial learning is required at the project level during the project period.

The production of adequate and reliable administrative information and knowledge for project management requires that all key project actors understand at least the fundamentals of project logic, results-based thinking, and the importance of planning and implementing activities that contribute to the set objectives and align with the cross-cutting principles of Finnish development policy. This entails that the project actors prepare concrete plans responding to the project document, collect reliable data for the monitoring of results (such as gender-disaggregated participant numbers), and report the use of working hours promptly. The interview data indicates that this does not happen without challenges:

The excerpt above illustrates that the representative of the coordinating agency perceives a strong responsibility for ensuring project quality, particularly with regard to adhering to results-based management requirements in both implementation and reporting. It also shows how the Northern agency representative feels that the partner institutions do not attach the same level of importance to these procedures, despite repeated training and guidance.

Learning by doing, assessing and reporting

In addition to deliberately planned training activities included in the project plan, there are other arenas and methods of learning in the project context. One of them is provided by co-creation processes where key experts from both North and South come together to innovate, create, and prepare new curricula, course plans, methods, and other educational resources. Through sharing expert knowledge with each other, creating something new together, and testing it in practice, individuals both in Southern and Northern HEIs learn and can contribute better to translating it into organizational learning as well.

At the project level, there are several ways to promote learning from project implementation itself. These include the use of various digital and on-site feedback methods focusing not only on the past (feedback) but also on what can be done better in the future (feed forward) as well as assessing key lessons learned. Another learning opportunity is the process of report writing. Having more people participate in writing reports can be invaluable for understanding how the project proceeds and what kind of thoughts, considerations, and ideas the various actors have in their minds.

Evaluations, both internal and external, can be effective tools for learning if they succeed in bringing out new perspectives and insights. However, the data brings up the observation that the Southern partners, and even external evaluations, seldom voice critical perspectives. As said by one interviewee:

What does Jamk learn?

Beyond documenting learning by Southern partners and at the project level, the data also sheds light on learning within Northern institutions. Even though this is not – and for funding reasons cannot be – an explicit priority in development projects, it is important that Northern partners also engage in learning.

First, the partners from the Global North need to learn to collaborate in the project. As described earlier, both administrative and expert knowledge include elements that are new to Northern actors and some underlying processes can only be understood with the help of tacit knowledge. It is crucial for successful project implementation that the Northern actors learn to understand the context from the partners’ perspectives.

The data also shows that learning is important for many Northern individuals working on projects, often for motivational reasons. Project work in remote locations requires a willingness to take on new, uncertain tasks and the flexibility to travel at odd hours, for example. At Jamk, the pedagogical staff members who work as experts in development projects do not get any extra benefits for their work. Thus, motivation needs to come from something else and, for many, this motivation comes from personal development i.e. learning.

Learning is also important for Jamk as an organization to have skillful project coordinators and to be successful in new project calls. Some interviewees mentioned how their learning can be used in later project planning or implementation. However, the interviews do not include concrete examples of what learning for Jamk at the organizational level would mean.

How do the Finnish actors learn in the project context? Not surprisingly, the main method coming up from the data is learning by doing – that is being part of the implementation, discussing various issues with the partners, and listening to their ideas and elaborations. In practice, this means spending time with each other. Some interviewees emphasize the need to be informed of the whole project and its proceedings to be able to relate to the overall objectives and other components of it. Some interviewees also brought up the wish to have open discussions about project implementation with critical reflection.

Towards more equitable and learning-oriented North-South partnerships

As the previous sections show, various types of knowledge are produced, shared, and learned in a project context. Only some of it can be used in project reports, which emphasize the role of administrative knowledge. However, quality project implementation requires sharing and learning from expert knowledge and tacit knowledge as well.

The challenge of the coordinating agency is to find a balance between demands that are difficult to combine. The reporting requirements assume a strong focus on administrative information and knowledge, whereas building equal partnerships would require spending time on constructing and sharing expert and tacit knowledge and learning together. Developing mutual understanding and learning from cultural and contextual factors requires time for reflection and dialogue. This is often connected with trust building, which also needs time spent together. Carbonnier and Kontinen (2014, pp.10–12) also point out that shortcomings in intercultural communication and a lack of understanding of the local context by Northern partners are reasons for some of the worst practices in academic collaboration. To tackle that, there needs to be time to work together both in the North and in the South.

The HEI ICI projects included in the article shared a common objective: the development of innovative and sustainable practices for higher education institutions in the Global South. To facilitate this, training programs for the staff of Southern partner institutions were included in their activities. According to the project strategies, as the professional competence of Southern staff increases, so too does their capacity to design new practices as well as their ability to sustain and further refine these practices over time. In this sense, project work is inherently forward-looking, whereas project reporting remains consistently retrospective.

The challenge of the coordinating agency is to find a balance between demands that are difficult to combine. The reporting requirements assume a strong focus on administrative information and knowledge, whereas building equal partnerships would require spending time on constructing and sharing expert and tacit knowledge and learning together.

This difference in the logics of project implementation and reporting may be part of the explanation for why the coordinating agency, and especially the program managers, sometimes found it challenging to obtain accurate and timely administrative information for their reports from the South. Also, while all project activities are planned to support relevant needs and local practices in partner institutions, results-based management with a strong focus on quantitative data follows an external logic that may not be supported by local processes. To some extent, the logic of the coordinating HEI may be difficult for Southern HEIs to understand. Garbonnier & Kontinen (2014, p. 11) also point out that Northern universities may seem very bureaucratic and messy to the Southern partners, as they delay payments and give “top-down instructions” with no room for negotiation.

The aim of this article has been to understand how Northern project actors see the need for knowledge and opportunities for learning in project contexts. Aiming to understand only the Northern perspective gives, of course, a very limited view of the situation. To get a more balanced picture, it would be important to pose similar questions to Southern actors in the same context. So, an evident need for further investigation is to study the Southern experts’ perspectives on knowledge and learning in project collaboration.

Extensive learning takes place in a project setting like the HEI-ICI projects, both as planned outcomes and as a side effect. Learning in the coordinating agency is not – and cannot be – an objective per se in a project funded by development cooperation funds. However, as learning still happens, the question is whether it remains an experience of individual people or if the coordinating agency can make use of it as an organization that learns and develops its own practices as well (see Kontinen & Nguyahambi, 2020). The data in this article does not include examples of the latter. This would make a good topic for further investigation.

This article provides practical examples illustrating the well-documented fact that even sincere efforts to establish equal partnerships are often marked by an unbalanced division of power in agenda-setting and accountability structures (see, e.g. Bradley 2017; Carbonnier & Kontinen 2014). At the same time, identifying the types of knowledge needed and used in project contexts and focusing on various modalities and arenas of learning – while also incorporating perspectives from Southern partners – can take us a step forward in understanding how to foster more equal partnerships in the future.