Zambia Diary | Day 5, Visit 2 | The Workshop

Group work: indicative skills and participation – for the form used, see below

Jane and I were very pleased with the way the workshop went. It seemed to go very well. I can take no credit for the design, that was down to Jane. I just did the techie bits! Jane put all she’s ever learnt from our workshopper friends into this one! Elizabeth Gray-King will recognise the ‘Wall and Hammer’ technique although we just used red and yellow post-it notes: red for problems and barriers and yellow for solutions and insights.

Everyone we wanted to be there was there – 17 people from 11 organisations. Dr Nilda Lambo from UNICEF kicked the workshop off explaining UNICEF’s interest in the well-being of children in general and ORS/diarrhoea and innovation in particular. Nilda was accompanied by three of her colleagues: Rogers who heads the Mother and Child Health team; Jesper who is a monitoring and evaluation specialist and Precious who is part of the Social Policy and Economic Analysis team and helped with the administration for the workshop.

Other organisations present, in alphabetical order, were: CHAZ (The Churches Health Association of Zambia); JSI; Keepers Zambia Foundation; Medical Stores Limited (MSL); Ministry of Health; SABMiller – Coca-Cola bottler; the Society for Family Health; Transaid and World Vision.

A sample of the outputs produced through group working relating to two aspects of the pilot: Social Marketing and Distribution. Red = barrier/problem; Yellow = solution/insight

As well as confronting the challenges we may face moving forward and coming up with solutions to these (with red and yellow Post-Its), we also did group work looking at the level of interest and experience for the different roles in the pilot. The levels we used were:

1. We have skills and experience in this area;
2. We have data/intelligence in this area that we would be willing to share;
3. We would, in principle, be interested in an implementation role in this area;
4. We would, in principle, be interested in leading in this area

The form we used can be downloaded here: A3 format; A4 format. We’ve ended up with three of these sheets completed by the three groups and these will be invaluable in mapping expertise and interest in the different aspects of the pilot from the different potential partners.

We have a follow-up meeting with UNICEF on Tuesday next week to look at the Logical Framework for the pilot. In the meantime we’ve got a lot to digest whilst we start turning all these workshop outputs into a pilot plan.

Of course, we have no formal commitments yet and there is a way to go before we see signed partnership agreements, but we have made a great start. A big thank-you to all those who gave up their Friday morning to participate and to UNICEF for providing the collaboration platform.

[Those interested in the use of social media, please read on…. We met with Ruth yesterday at Keepers Foundation Zambia for the first time this trip and she had been following this diary since we arrived and so was fully briefed on the meetings we’d had and the people we’d met. At this workshop, at least two participants came with a print out of pages from this blog. So this diary is helping potential pilot partners to keep informed of developments as they happen. Try doing that effectively using email! ]