Forging Connections and Innovating Solutions, Virtually

When the pandemic forced FFI to cancel the in-person Monitoring Challenge Workshop scheduled for May 2020 in Johannesburg, South Africa, FFI was quick to think out of the box.

After surveys and a thorough landscape analysis of online meeting platforms, FFI opted to hold a virtual Monitoring Challenge Workshop on an online collaboration hub called Slack that allows participants to communicate without temporal or language barriers. Slack enabled participants to share country-specific presentations and hold discussions among country teams or among all workshop participants.

FFI invited participants from 10 African countries that fortify 75% or more of their wheat flour and that had attempted or were currently attempting to put in place regulatory monitoring structures but needed assistance in the establishment of such structures and frameworks: Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The meeting kicked off in August 2020 and wrapped up in October 2020.

Like many things in 2020, the workshop was not without its challenges. The level of contribution from each team was limited due to the virtual nature of the meeting; six countries (Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda) were active contributors throughout the virtual meeting.

Yet, for those who attended, the workshop created a community of learning, kept participants engaged, and assisted country teams in working through specific monitoring challenges. A follow-up survey was conducted among all participants in order to gauge usefulness of the content and plans for using the shared information. Teams from two countries, Senegal and Nigeria, left the meeting with a bit more. Senegal and Nigeria were selected as winners following a workshop-wide vote on the most effective and realistic solutions. Both countries will receive targeted technical assistance from FFI to operationalize the solutions they developed during the workshop.

See the event page for more information.