FSG South Africa: Building a Stakeholder Scoring Framework

Aditya joined FSG's South Africa project at a point where the client had no clear picture of where development aid was going. Multiple stakeholders, including community leaders, local government, national government, and field practitioners, each held different and often conflicting views on the same situations.

His mandate was to design a research framework that could take those divergent inputs and produce something analytically usable. He built a scoring system: a structured set of questions tied to weighted metrics, where each stakeholder group could register their position on key issues. The design was intentional, built to surface disagreement rather than paper over it.

He owned the stakeholder engagement and analysis end to end. This included conducting virtual interviews with stakeholders across the different groups, collecting their scores, and running quantitative analysis on the results.

When the data came back, it surfaced a conflict the team had not anticipated: two stakeholder groups showed directly opposing views on a core issue. The scoring system had worked as designed, but the conflict it revealed required a response the original project plan had not accounted for.

Aditya's internship term ended at that point. He handed off the findings to the full FSG team, who conducted a second round of targeted interviews with the most relevant stakeholders. He followed up with the team through that process. The second round resolved the conflict and gave the client a clear enough picture to move forward with FSG.