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Comment by Bobby Zachariah on March 26, 2010 at 2:25pm

Experiences after Nairobi - in the field

By: BK Barlaya,

BIRDS - India

BIRDS works with women in sex work since 1996 trying to help them to get empowered, help them to get increased awareness and realize their rights as equal to other civilians. In this process, we started with intervention as an outside agency, later identified their own community members and trained them as facilitators, later through them worked towards promotion of their own collectives and today collectives are working on their own with or even without support of BIRDS organisation.

Following return from Nairobi, after attending AIDS Competence Training, I had an opportunity to interact with different stake holders of the program, namely

1. Core team members of project (Staff and Sahabhagini (federation) office bearers)
2. General body members of federation and leaders of different collectives,
3. Representatives of Donor agency (HIVOS)

First meeting was held on 04th March 2010 at BIRDS project office in Gokak where we had interaction with core staff and office bearers of Sahabhagini. This meeting was organized to discuss and plan for the future perspectives of Sahabhagini (federation). Though it was a small group of 9 members we tried to use some components of ACP approach like we tried to identify what is our dream for future? After developing individual dreams we tried to put it together and develop it as Vision of Sahabhagini. Finally we developed vision as “To ensure integrated development of community of women in sex work through the institutional efforts”. This was followed by spelling out of mission statement using the same process. It was a good experience for the participants to develop dream and bring it together and spell it.

Second occasion was with general body of Sahabhagini and leaders of collectives where there were about 25 women. This meeting which was held on 12th March 2010, also tried to focus on specifying the future perspectives. Hence findings of last core committee meeting were shared with members and it was endorsed by every one. Later we used following three questions.

In the light of dream that we have endorsed, where are we now? Where we need to go? How we should go about? Through initiating this process, an opportunity was created for self assessment and for fixing the future direction. We spent more than 10 hours (starting from 11.00 am to 09.45 pm) to complete this process. It helped the members to fix the future direction of work.

I also did share my learning at Nairobi to our program officers of HIVOS Bangalore office, who were happy to know that this ACP process will be initiated with collectives for self assessment and improvement. They are curious to know the result. They had visited BIRDS from 11 to 13th March 2010.

Comment by April Foster on March 10, 2010 at 12:16pm

Lilian...this is such a fantastic example of how the simple practise of SALT can be so transforming for us as organisations...thank you for sharing along with the photo. April

Comment by Lilian Nyakerario Otiso on March 9, 2010 at 8:43pm

Greetings everyone! I hadn't realized how much i had learnt during the partner's platform until i visited a community and realized how much community participation is important. This community lives by the lakeside where they bathe, wash clothes, dishes and fetch their household water. To protect them form disease, a project was launched to provide clean bath shelters with running water but they failed to be used. Reason? lake bathing allows one to hear the village gossip and keep in touch!
Lesson of the day - listen to the community :-)

Comment by April Foster on February 22, 2010 at 1:45pm

Friends (East AFrica Sub-Group)

Greetings! I trust each of you is well. Just a reminder that during our Nairobi meeting, we started work on developing a shared Self-Assessment Framework. Each of us indicated a particular practise that we would take the leadership for drafting descriptions of Level 1 - 5, which the rest of the HIVOS team could then interact with. Below a summary of those practices. We look forward seeing your thoughts during the week of 1st March:

Creco: Learning & Sharing

Cobades: Ownership

EANNASO: Organisational Behaviour

KANCO: Risk Reduction

LVCT: M&E (Maina) and Resources (Lilian)

Thanks everyone.

April

Comment by Rituu B. Nanda on February 19, 2010 at 3:39pm

Excellent facilitation, Ricardo! I am getting to learn so much.

Comment by Ricardo Walters on February 19, 2010 at 11:19am

Friends,

Video reflections on our Nairobi meeting are now posted at:

http://aidscompetence.ning.com/video/chrispin-chomba
http://aidscompetence.ning.com/video/olive-mumba
http://aidscompetence.ning.com/video/naomi-mwamba
http://aidscompetence.ning.com/video/indumathi-ravi-shankar
http://aidscompetence.ning.com/video/karunakara-barlaya
http://aidscompetence.ning.com/video/nokhwezi-hoboyi

Everyone looks great! Thanks for your contribution.

Enjoy!
Ricardo

Comment by Bollaru Karunakara Barlaya on February 13, 2010 at 1:06pm

t was wonderfull experience to share and learn from each other in Kenya. I personally feel that I have grown a lot and I thank HIVOS for the oppertunity, Constellation for the effective learning process and all co participants for helping to learn and share.

Learning in life long process and we learn from each of our encounter with other person. As a result of interaction with different partners in Kenya I feel I have gained a lot. I will work on transfering this learning to communties with whom I am working for so that the process of sharing, learning really gets transfered and reaches to ultimate beneficirys.

By and Thank you all for wonderfull oppertunity

Comment by Ricardo Walters on February 12, 2010 at 5:20pm

Friends,

Photos from our week together are posted at http://aidscompetence.ning.com/photo/albums/hivos-partners-platform.

Please feel free to post your own as well.

Ricardo

Comment by Indumathi Ravi Shankar on February 12, 2010 at 1:22pm

Human capacities are the foundation of actions we take. This core capacity needs to be built through conscious and constant review, reflection, learning and practice. This is inclusive of processes to support, stimulate, appreciate, ask about the actions taken, listen, learn and link them with appropriate sources, work in teams and transfer learning from one community / organisation to others. This will enable capacity building not just within a particular organisation or constituency but with several individuals and constituencies through a process of sharing and transferring the learning so that many are benefited.
As Hivos partners, we have just started this process of sharing and transfer learning. Thanks to all of you. It was a rich experience to me to interact with all.
Indu

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