A five-day regional meeting was organized by the We are Able! Programme Knowledge Management Working Group in Nairobi, Kenya from October 4-8.
The We are Able! programme, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Power of Voices Partnerships for Strengthening Civil Society, is being implemented by a consortium consisting of ZOA, the African Disability Forum, See You Foundation (Light for the World), the Leprosy Mission Netherlands, VNG International and The Hague Academy for Local Governance. The programme is also implemented together with the local partners in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda between 2021-2025.
The We are Able! programme strives at co-creating inclusive governance for access to basic resources that leaves no one behind. We are Able! focuses on empowerment, amplifying voices and creating resilience among persons (including men, women, and youth) with disabilities and other excluded groups, particularly those faced with food insecurity in areas of protracted crises. While persons with disabilities are the core target group of the We are Able! program, we create benefits for other excluded groups like vulnerable women, youth in general, marginalized ethnic groups and internally displaced persons (IDPs), as applicable per context.
The main goal of the We are Able! Knowledge Management is to ensure that knowledge/experiences within the programme are continuously assembled and transformed, including through partnerships, into better development results for people with disabilities and other marginalised groups, and for greater programme impact.
As part of the Knowledge Management-MEL framework, annual learning and sharing events are designed to generate, use, and share the best available evidence and experiential knowledge to achieve higher quality operations as well as greater visibility and influence. Hence, the knowledge management working group aims to deliver outcomes including enhance use of evidence-based planning and programming, peer-learning and knowledge and good practices sharing across the programme, a strong learning culture among WaA! Partners through interactive/collaborative engagements, sharing and co-creation and higher quality interventions and country-specific results through adaptive programming and action learning for the We are Able! programme between 2021-2025.
The main objectives of the regional learning and sharing event included:
- Share lessons learnt/challenges and bests practices from Y1 implementation period;
- Discuss Baseline 1&2 findings and the scoping studies with the view of streaming baseline data for the WaA! Basket indicators;
- Discuss the integration of food and nutrition security and the Y2 implementation plans;
- Discuss the shift of power training conducted in county;
- Discuss how to integrate Local Authorities in the central role of promoting food and nutrition security for persons with disabilities;
- Harmonize the understanding of the WaA! programme among Country Coordinators and Monitoring and Evaluation officers;
- Discuss the role of L&A in Food and Nutrition security and the Y2 implementation;
- Generate insights for the finalization of the Y2 detailed planning for the WaA! programme to be submitted in November 2021 to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs;
- Teambuilding.
The main outputs achieved by the event include feedbacks on the baseline study findings, reflection on lessons learned from Year 1 of the programme and scoping studies research, food security and livelihoods governance, lobby and advocacy at country level/disability inclusion and shift of power, team-building and Year 2 implementation plans.
Participants included representatives from We are Able! programme, staffs from the six African countries where the program is under implementation representing ADF, ZOA, VNG international, the Hague Academy for Local Governance, See You Foundation and The Leprosy Mission, and also colleagues from the ZOA HQ Netherlands.
