Documenting and sharing lessons

Full report:Exchange lunchtime discussion 1 November 2001

Pat Norrish, an independent consultant, believes that those working in natural resources and health communication can learn a lot from each other. She described a project in Uganda that helps identify communication needs of stakeholders (including farmers) in the project's target area.

Introduction - natural resources information systems: research and dissemination

Pat opened the discussion by describing a project that she had worked on in Uganda last May. It is a DFID and National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) project called Client Oriented Agricultural Research and Dissemination (COARD) run from the Serere Agricultural and Animal Production Research Institute (SAARI). The purpose of the project is to assist SAARI staff and stakeholders to identify current communication needs of stakeholders (including farmers) in the project's target area. Pat noted that over the last decade a number of issues that need to be addressed have been identified in natural resources research projects and Natural Resources Knowledge and Information Systems. These include:

• Acknowledgement that information from outside makes an important contribution to development
• Outputs of research (practice and products) are not being taken up
• Failure on the part of governmental organisations, non-governmental organisations, and community-based organisations to communicate effectively at all levels (assumptions are made instead)
• The resource rich tend to be information rich, while poor people loose out
• The ‘communication context’ within which organisations and communities live and work is poorly understood
• Oganisations lack the capacity to deliver
• We need to find out the reality of the particular ‘communication context’

Finding out about the reality of the ‘communication context’ - the actual communication methods used, the needs of farmers, and the capacity of various stakeholders to meet these needs - is essential. This also means finding adequate methods to assess this reality.

Sharing lessons learned: Exchange and other organisations

Understanding the communication context of work being done in health communication is key to Exchange’s work. Through a series of exercises, participants looked at how information could be shared about lessons learned. First the meeting explored the kinds of information organisations were interested in receiving from Exchange, and how they would like Exchange to share such information. Then participants looked at how their own organisations shared lessons, and to what audiences.

Exchange

Table 1: How people would like Exchange to share information, and about what (PDF format 12 KB)

Table 2: How other organisations share lessons and to what audience and where (PDF format 15 KB)

From the tables above, which chart how organisations would like to receive information from Exchange, we can see that there was a fairly even spread across the different dissemination ‘vehicles’ that Exchange employed and the kinds of information being shared. Key needs were for accounts of lessons learned received via e-mail, and for the work of other organisations to be made known both through face-to-face engagement at workshops, and through access to databases of such information. Concise information on policy was also something that organisations valued.

Organisations’ own dissemination

When looking at the organisations present, it was clear that their dissemination practices were quite similar to their declared information needs from Exchange: they showed a similar interest in disseminating information on policy, and that sharing information about current thinking was key for most of those present. There was a similar emphasis on sharing information about lessons learned, although none of the organisations present appeared to do this using a database. The continued importance of concise printed information was perhaps a surprising finding, such that a growing use of electronic media was a supplement rather than a replacement for paper based materials.

Evaluation of the session

13 of 15 people present filled in and returned evaluation forms. The practical exercises and field-based example (5), the participatory process (8), the relevance to people’s work (5), the opportunity to share ideas and learn about what other organisations were doing (5), and the open and active facilitation (3) were highlighted as positive features of the session. (Numbers in brackets indicate the number of times the point was referred to in some way.) Not having enough time to discuss ideas or to interact with others (6), the small number of people who attended (2), the need for more specificity (2), and suggestions to increase participatory activities (2) were among the problems and suggestions for improvement. Two specific ideas on improving the sessions will be included in the planning for next year’s discussions. These were:

• make available a participants’ list with at least e-mail contacts
• allow for an informal discussion to continue after the end of the formal session, for people who want to continue the dialogue
• A wide range of topics were suggested for future discussions. These included:
• consumer voice in health communication*
• tools to listen, multiply for communication in advocacy*
• solutions to documenting and learning
• practical applications at project level*
• how to measure/monitor effectiveness and/or impact of
• information sharing methods and processes
• developing monitoring and evaluation indicators
• how to tools - scoping
• South to South learning
• interagency exchange strategies
• learning from project work*
• creative ideas for communicating across long distances
• communication strategies for bottom to top messages
• context and issue specific strategies
• innovation in communication practice and the …..
• intersectoral opportunities for communication*
• current trends in child health communication

(*topics where someone has volunteered to lead a discussion)

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