Journal on Cross Country Learning Event, Tanzania

Wednesday, 3rd October 2008. First blog session from Dar es Salaam. It will be a kind of diary, through which I want to share with you some impressions on the cross country learning events (CCLE). This annual events brings together people working with ICT4D in the health sector. It’s a perfect opportunity for exchanging experiences, learning and therewith adding value to the development of ICT applications in the health sector.

First impressions are good. There is a lot of exchange and indeed what I also detect, is that there is a huge need for interaction. Discussions are lively and people are eager to share their experiences. There is also a lot of laughter and that shows that the atmosphere is excellent. Quotes reflect general ideas. The following were made during the first day.

‘A CCLE is a kind of library’ or ‘a thinking might create problems and other thinking might create challenges’. The best one of the day is the following: ‘I was only thinking in terms of the broadening bandwidth. Face-to-face meeting like the one over here creates the broadest bandwidth’.

Official openings in Africa are a special kind of sport. The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MoH) was present and the highest authority of COSTECH. Nice speeches which were far too long. Leveraging was highlighted and I think that through the presence of the highest civil servant of MoH we have an entrance at the Ministry for leveraging. We should take advantage of this significant step forward. There were also a bunch of journalists representing different newspapers and television stations. This resulted in an item on the 19:00 hours news of approximately 5 minutes. I have not seen the newspapers yet and how many times IICD is mentioned. Pity that the papers are not read in Europe as it may assist us in the acquisition of funds.

During the first day we exchanged information about all the projects which have been or are being initiated. This brought forward a lively exchange and in between the different sessions people also started to extract knowledge from each other. It is a pity that all the knowledge exchanged can never be captured completely. In general the projects in Eastern and Southern Africa can be clustered in a few categories. There are projects focussing on health management information systems, e-learning/distance learning, tele-consultation. There are also projects which cannot be captured in these categories, such as the one about data for blood transfusion in Zambia and the one about community health.

The projects of Mali are very interesting for the participants coming from the other side of the continent. I am afraid that there is an eagerness to adopt this project also for the Eastern and Southern region. The reason that the people like this project is that it is very focussed and practical. Think big and act small is an adagio which should also be a guideline for the other projects.

Some of the projects are still in the formation phase. That is not a problem for the participants, but I am of the opinion that it also dilutes the CCLE a bit. The exchange remains vague because it can not be based on true experiences during the implementation phase.

The analysis of the M&E data done by my IICD colleague Hannah is shared extensively. We sticked the lessons learned to the wall and requested for comments. That is happening now. It is nice way how we can use the M&E in a project. The challenge remains how we can specify the lessons learned better. Maybe we should add some qualitative data and a qualitative analysis. I am wondering if we can extract more lessons learned on the basis of the data we are gathering as lessons learned are usually also context dependent so-to-say.

The Health Management Information Systems are at different stages of development. Most of them are still busy with the organisation at central level, whereas the step of organizing the data at the more peripheral level and especially the jump that the peripheral health units should make use of these data for the improvement of their management is not made. I have the impression that many of the managers also did not make the jump mentally so there is a lot awareness to be done.

What also strikes me is that there is hardly any discussion about software, like was the case in discussions on the CCLE online Dgroup.

So far the first impressions. Shall try to share some more of the experiences tomorrow.