Dear colleagues working in Africa,
When Bernd Appelt invited me to participate in your sector network conference and to contribute issues and thoughts from the Asian perspective I was thinking about what I could contribute that would be different from an Asian perspective.
So I considered that maybe a SWOT analysis would bring us forward. Therefore today I will share with you some ideas about the Strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats that we face in the Asian network. I am not presenting a Power Point but I want to share with you some - maybe uncomfortable - thoughts since these are our internal days.
As a long-time member of Sector networks I am convinced that sector networks have and will continue to have an important role in knowledge management processes in GIZ, they have provided good and important contributions with regard to capacity development of Sector networks’ technical members and with regard to products that can be used in GIZ, for BMZ in the international health agenda and last not least for improving health and social protection in our partner countries.
But, not only has our GIZ changed over the past years also our working environment and the context have changed. My hope is that at the end of our meeting - and this afternoon is just the beginning - we will have identified together more opportunities than threats and weaknesses. So coming back to my topic, weaknesses are the past, threats are always there and have to be managed, strengths have to be nurtured and opportunities present our future.
I think most of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are essentially not so different between both networks Asia and Africa. But there are some issues that have to be considered differently from my perspective.
Strengths:
In both networks we have a very comprehensive portfolio that covers many important aspects of health and social protection which is accompanied by a wealth of comprehensive expertise in the different projects and programs. Many of our member projects are very innovative and active, for example a recent acquisition of co-financing that has been stimulated and facilitated by the sector network.
SN members are networking independently and the sector network supports the exchange and cooperation. in Asia we have thus had inter regional conferences/ webinars/ studies and the support of regional conferences by task teams and last not least of the sector network conference in November last year. During this conference we formed new TTs in order to react to new topics. We started activities on cross-cutting issues e.g. inclusion / PPP, we do have a motivated Steering Group and we do have a cooperation with SN Africa, MENA & LAC e.g. Connect Newsletter
Weaknesses
However, in the SN Asia we have a geographical divide and unequal representation between Central Asia and Eastern Europe, South Asia and South East Asia. This means that we are working in health and social protection systems with regionally different requirements from our partner side, systems emanating from different historical political systems and having therefore different objectives and requirements. This makes it difficult to develop aggregated approaches that might be valid from one system to the other. Active and continuous participation off all our SN members is a continuous concern; and I remember when I took over the speaker role, one of my personal objectives was that I wanted to enhance a more continuous collaboration of more individual network members. We are working on themes of our core business but have too few members who work on strategic /cross-cutting issues. Though we would like to attribute the acquisition of co-financing to SN activity, there is honestly no evidence that these acquisitions would not have happened without the SN work. Or is it?? I think we share the concern that communication tools are not consistently used and did not meet the need of members in the past. In Asia we found that we had limited support and ownership of AVs/program directors. We used to have an OP that was perceived as too rigid and we continuously face the difficulty to receive updates and feedback from our members and AVs, we have quite a few alumni in the region but we have not yet found the way to involve them continuously and actively in the SN.
Threats
These weakness are (or let me say seem to be) compounded by new financial guidelines which correspond to budget cuts. This will allow us fewer face-to-face meetings or regional conferences like this week or other events which can generate public interest. We see a something between a decline and stagnation of the health and social protection portfolio in the Asian and Eastern European region. The working time that members are ready to invest in the SN is limited due to increasing workload in the core business and last not least the incentives for members remain limited.
So now let me come to the most important part of this, the future of our SN, the opportunities that are out there and that maybe we have not yet completely seized or utilised.
Some of us might remember with nostalgia the “good old times” when we had more time to react to requests and to communicate. But also we hardly knew about what the others were doing and it was time and travel intensive to exchange with colleagues on the continent and beyond. Today not only in GIZ we have a plethora of new communication tools, we have almost everywhere access to the internet and we can find more information on our colleagues, their projects, their approaches than we are sometimes able to digest.
Within GIZ, albeit somewhat delayed, with the Global Campus 21 platform we have found our easy–to-use platform to increase virtual cooperation and knowledge exchange in and between SNs.
Many of us in the past two years have become acquainted with Virtual meetings via the Lync tool or Skype and we are conducting webinars across countries and continents.
We have changed and adapted our internal organisation. In the SN Asia we have now more flexibility due to agreed outputs and no more a rigid OP.
We have established that as an incentive for SN members their engagement should be included in the goals of their staff talks and thus allow for some flexible remuneration.
In contrary to the Africa network, in the past we had hardly any TT or WG meetings in the past couple of years, now we have learnt and have started a kind of Competition for TT / thematic meetings.
The new structure of the TTs that we established during the November conference represents members’ core activities better and involves thematic areas that are only recently more in the foreground, thus we have a new TT on private sector & inclusion.
Last not least the motivation to cooperate with SN HeSP Africa, MENA & LAC is high and there is a big interest to increase this cooperation.
And … the extensive alumni network in the region represents an opportunity that we have not put into value yet.
So what are my messages for the common future of both our sector networks?
· Let’s increase cooperation between the SN Africa and Asia
· Let’s continue with face-to-face meetings
· Let’s add value to virtual learning and communication.
And last not least, motivation in a network which is based on voluntary participation can only be upheld or ideally increased if individual members and projects benefit from their commitment, individually and collectively and if they experience and feel this benefit. And I think that motivation and commitment is what we need to nurture. And this will yield the products and successes we aim for.
Anne Frisch
Speaker of the Sector Network Health and Social Protection in Asia and Eastern Europe