Cross country peer-to-peer assist

I am already back in The Netherlands but I still owe you a reflection of the third and therefore last day of the Cross Country Learning Event (CCLE) in Tanzania. The first and second days are also covered in blogs.

During the third day we had a ‘ peer-to-peer assist'. For those who do not know the term, a peer-to-peer assist is a session whereby a project owner presents a problem/challenge to other project owners, with the request to come forward with suggestions for improvements or solving certain problems. People came forward with realistic problems and this session evoked sparkling discussions. For instance a certain project owner in Uganda was struggling with setting up a maintenance system in the periphery. How do you maintain contacts with the help desk organisations if your computer breaks down? And therefore if there is no communication, how do you financially maintain such a support/maintenance system? One of the options discussed was the suggestion for setting up a kind of fee for members/users so that we can finance such a maintenance system. A Tanzanian organisation had some experience with it, which helped actually its Ugandan counterpart to move forward.

Generally I learned that the peer-to-peer sessions indeed did assist the project owners with their problems and that the interaction between project owners did bring forward suggestions based on practical experiences. Is this remark an open door? I hope so.

We ended the three-day seminar with an evaluation session. It brought forward some nice remarks which I want to share with you.

• “Out of the three expectations I did only meet one. I expected Power Point presentations: no Power Points. I expected hand outs every evening: no hand outs. I expected knowledge: there was an overwhelming amount of knowledge.”
• “5 th October ( the closing date of the CCLE ) should continue.”
• “CCLE is a big library.”
• “Mali has inspired. It gives courage. Hope to meet again.”
• “Thanks for the commitment of IICD and Cordaid.”
• “Expectations were met. Do not stop here.”
• “We shared much more than in other types of seminars. It was not possible to sleep at this seminar.”
• “The level commitment was very good. Health does not know any boundaries and this is also shown in the East-West exchange.”
• “You made us take part of the whole process and the added value will not run away from me. “
• “Simple is beautiful. Very interesting and wonderful. Asante Sana.”