The latest from the Ethiopia CSA: listen to Kenaw Gabreselassie's updates
Highlights from the interview
Kenaw Gabreselassie - Save the Children Coordinator for SUN CSA Ethiopia.
Conducted on the 29th September 2016
Advocacy: Strongest area of intervention
On the National Food security and Nutrition Policy
“Policy, data collection and sharing, Multi Sectoral Platform would have a place in our advocacy work. As SUN CSA- an advocacy platform we have been closely working with government in trying to shape what the government… …… support ….nutrition interventions…” Kenaw Gabreselassie
“In collaboration with Save the Children UK, we have recently developed an advocacy strategy for our future initiative and engaged all our members to participate in the development, content, design and identifying key objectives we want to achieve in the future for this country”. Kenaw Gabreselassie
Data collection: Second strongest area of intervention
“…. 5-6 months ago we organised a story documentation work at community level…. We travelled to localities where good works are going on around nutrition….to tackle malnutrition…….at community level, …we travelled to smaller localities and collected good stories around these and planned to share with other localities.”
“We have already shared the stories with our members and other nutrition players in different channels so they could scale up these good examples…..now we are planning to organise a learning forum to share the stories, the good lessons with the community where these experiences are lacking….we have planned to do this at regional level”.
On Learning Route expectations
“There will definitely be some innovative ways of addressing malnutrition. There are civil societies….which has had great experiences that should be taken home. Some innovative ways of how we engage with other nutrition players such as the government.
“…we want to learn how other civil societies in other countries would effectively implement nutrition programs, nutrition advocacy in particular…. ….there could be several innovative ways of doing this (nutrition advocacy). How can we ensure multi sectoral coordination? Convincing all nutrition actors coming together and working for the big picture, the big changes we want to see in this country around nutrition. We expect to gain experiences, best practices from other countries around these”.
On what CSA expect from Ethiopia representatives
On preparing delegates for Learning Route
“Set up a meeting with representatives to discuss what we are going to share, with other participants, which areas we should be focusing on…we will be sitting together to design good ways of sharing, how we present…. In a way we can showcase what we have done…. also what government is doing and what support we are providing to the government as well”. Kenaw Gabriselassie
On using what you have learned) from this experience when you return
“Experiences we gain from the Learning Route should not be confined to those who will go to Rwanda. We should design a mechanism we use to share what we have gained”. Kenaw Gabreselassie
“…. we are thinking of organizing a learning event to share what we have gained from other civil societies”. Kenaw Gabreselassie
“We have our newsletter. We will be including some of the key stories...some of the good experiences we will get from Rwanda”. Kenaw Gabreselassie
“….the experience gained from other countries will be part of our inputs for the support we provide to government”. Kenaw Gabreselassie
On communication between CSAs after LR
“I suggest we should be able to establish an online shared platform it could be a Google group… to keep in touch with all our members and share experiences, a very attractive platform with good management may work well.” (SUNI CSP)
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Ethiopia Interview
Conducted: 29th September 2016
Interviewee: Kenaw Gabreselassie - Save the Children Coordinator for SUN CSA Ethiopia. Working for Transform Nutrition Programme for 3 years
Section1: Identifying examples to share at LR Rwanda
Q1. Which of these is your strongest area of intervention? Why? Tell me about your best practice example?
Advocacy would come first. Policy, data collection and sharing, Multi sectoral platform would have a place in our advocacy work. As SUN CSA- as an advocacy platform we have been closely working with government in trying to shape what the government…Ministry of Health……custodian for nutrition-in supporting the area of nutrition interventions…for example giving training to Parliamentarians (training in April) in collaboration with Ministry of Health….We should align everything we do with government programmes so we have to work closely with government… a nutrition sensitization workshop….was the strongest part of this years work in terms of nutrition…
We give trainings to members [platform members] as well on how members could do advocacy for nutrition….bringing these members on board for advocacy work…they have been given continuous training from 2015 to 2016.
In collaboration with Save the Children UK, we have recently developed an advocacy strategy for our future initiative and engaged all our members to participate in the development, content, design and identifying key objectives we want to achieve in the future for this country (Ethiopia).
Q2. Which is your second strongest area of intervention? Why? Tell me about your best practice example?
Data collection: We have a gap in documentation….there are good stories …good experiences at community, regional and national level. We haven’t not documented them well and shared with others, so they could learn from others’ experience….5-6 months ago we organised a story documentation work at community level…. We travelled to localities where good works are going on around nutrition …. For example how multi sectoral integration to tackle malnutrition is being done at community level, how nutrition diversity works… cooking demonstrations at community level … how nutrition sensitive agriculture is being done as well…we travelled to smaller localities and collected good stories around these (the above) and planned to shar with other localities. We have already shared the stories with our members and other nutrition players in different channels so they could scale up these good examples. One of ECSC-SUN objectives is gathering and sharing nutrition information and good experiences to increase learning and enhance CSOs capacity. now we are planning to organise a learning forum to share the stories, the good lessons with the community where these experiences are lacking….we have planned to do this at regional level.
We are encouraging our members (50 CSOs) to take the experiences and disseminate…learn how communities are implementing these interventions and scale up…. (we encourage them) to integrate them in their programmes… we also plan to organize a face to face discussion with other communities
Section 2: Expectations of the LR Process
Q1. What do you expect to get out of the learning route experience from the participants appointed by your CSA?
There will definitely be some innovative ways of addressing malnutrition. There are civil societies…..which have had great experiences that should be taken home. Some innovative ways of how we engage with other nutrition players such as the government, particularly in a country where the environment is restrictive, where everything is sometimes sensitive like nutrition…you may not expect nutrition would be (politically) sensitive...it is. So, we want to learn how other civil societies in other countries would effectively implement nutrition programs, nutrition advocacy in particular…. ….there could be several innovative ways of doing this (nutrition advocacy). How can we ensure multi sectoral coordination? Convincing all nutrition actors coming together and working forthe big picture, the big changes we want to see in this country around nutrition. We expect to gain experiences, best practices from other countries around these
Lack of multi-sectoral coordination. We have that problem. Ethiopia has a National Nutrition Programme, now we are in the second phase of the programme…and the signatories are more than 12 government sectors. But only Ministry of Health, the custodian of nutrition currently , is working a lot around nutrition. So we want all the sectors to come together and work together to tackle malnutrition. We want to learn from Rwanda, we want to learn from other countries.
Nutrition service delivery. We have more than 30,000 health extension workers deployed all over the country, but they mainly focus on provision of health services, and now includes nutrition services, mainly the clinical part of nutrition, even this has been introduced to their JD (job description) very recently… we expect to learn from other countries’ experiences on how we better help them in providing nutrition services to the community.
We want also to learn more about knowledge and information gathering and sharing as well.
Q2. How do you plan to use what you have learned (directly or indirectly) from this experience when you return?
Experiences we gain from the Learning route should not be confined to those who will go to Rwanda. We should design a mechanism we use to share what we have gained. From our side we are thinking to organize a learning event to share what we have gained from other civil societies. We have regular meetings and we should make this one a bit different, making it like a learning forum (than part of the regular meeting)
At the end of October we are planning to organise a photo exhibition. “Nutrition in photo” that aims to showcase our members nutrition interventions. Different interventions across the country. We will have a half-day event, which may be a very good opportunity to share the experiences we will gain fromin Rwanda LR.
We have our newsletter. We will be including some of the key stories...some of the good experiences we will get from Rwanda. We have lots of contacts in the area of nutrition, with government, big NGOs, Local NGOs…Civil Society Alliances should create a mechanism to share this learning, the experience gained from other countries will be part of our inputs for the support we provide to government. We will share with government nutrition.
Q3. What do you think the CSA could/should do to ensure an enabling learning environment before (supporting participants in sharing about the CSA) and after (supporting the participants in sharing and disseminating the learning with the Alliance CSOs)?
Set up a meeting with representatives to discuss what we are going to share with you, with other participants, which areas we should be focusing on…we will be sitting together to design good ways of sharing, how we present…. In a way we can showcase what we have done…. also what the what government is doing and what support we are providing to the government as well.
Section 3: Communication among CSAs
Q1. Are you engaging with other CSAs? (If yes) How? Benefits?
No. We need the experiences of other CSAs....We once travelled to Arusha Tanzania for a nutrition conference but had set up a meeting with Panita (Tanzania SUN CSA)… to learn from them about how they engage theirmembers, how they cascaded down their works to regional to local levels… this was the only engagement we had with other CSAS.We benefited a lot from the meeting.
Q2. If Participants at the LR agree that communication between CSAs would be beneficial what advise would you give us to help establish channels of communication for CSAs to continue sharing and learning from each other?
I suggest we should be able to establish an online shared platform it could be a Google group… to keep in touch with all our members and share experiences, a very attractive platform with good management may work well
There could be online fatigue of course, but with good management of the online platform, CSAs could come together, keep in touch and share experiences.
The other one is we need to refresh our communication, reaffirm our commitment for the changes we want to see at national and global level. We could do this through bringing CSA together annually once or twice a year to share experiences and strengthen relationships. This could work better I think.
Q3. Advantages/disadvantages
. [KG1]
Communication between CSAs has lots of advantages: the main one is experience sharing. Experience really matters. We may not know well how SUN network functions at national and regional level, may not know how we can influence govt officials well, media… to give attention to nutrition, how we can bring different sectors on board for nutrition action….. (What are the experiences of other countries? How well can we engage our members well for our cause – scaling up nutrition….
Q1. To make the learning experience enjoyable and fulfilling what innovative ways can you think of to share your best practices? Why?
Not that innovative, but in a café session like - sharing our experience in a group and rotating and listening to others and discuss what might stand out an innovative way of dealing malnutrition giving participants time to reflect on other countries experiences and how these relate to or different from interventions back home…give more time for participants to speak more in a way that everybody could comprehend….avoiding jargon andmuch slide presentation… making it like a community conversation instead…
Q2. What materials (posters, documentary, audio) have you found useful in the past for learning and sharing knowledge? Why?
Short documentaries with compelling stories could work well for me. Sharing an eye catching stories…what impresses me is stories....like somebody from Rwanda or Kenya tells me a story…I know that would work for someone else as well. Story telling kind of presentation is a good way of presenting and sharing experiences.
I don’t expect this learning programme to be the same like the other conferences (full of research presentation, dry policy and program document presentation) I have attended. I expect different ways of engaging different participants. It would be a good opportunity for Ethiopian delegates because we lack this part, I mean documentation and sharing. we might be able to plan a local kind of learning route after the Rwanda experience. I expect we will come back armed with different ways of sharing experiences.
[KG1] This is part of the above comment about establishing an online platform, so I cut and put it above. For this part you may include this paragraph written under
