First, we started by reviewing the strategic roadmap drawn up by the technical leads and consortium partners at the beginning of the project in 2015. The roadmap was the product of a two-day workshop in which our team envisioned what success would look like in five years and outlined how to get there. The roadmap had six strategies, which helped organize our wide-ranging activities into a manageable structure. We used the strategies as an internal guide over the course of the project, periodically checking to see where we were along the route in terms of short- and long-term goals.
Second, at the beginning of the fifth year of the project, we conducted a workshop to pause and reflect. Our idea was to come up with themes for the end of our project by looking at the roadmap and our results and lessons learned so far. By this time, the project had produced 60 publications, published 200 stories on the website, and delivered more than 50 technical presentations. Through a facilitated process our technical leads, consortium partners, and the chiefs-of-party from the project offices sifted through the experiences of their programs to analyze what worked best in which situations and discern commonalities. This resulted in several main takeaways. Reviewing our strategies and the main takeaways, we developed themes to use for our end-of-project events and products.
Third, almost a year later, we did a final pulse check. How did our themes dovetail with the body of knowledge accumulated and USAID’s strategies? As a global project we are charged with delivering results and showing the path toward USAID goals such as private sector engagement and the journey to self-reliance. Using that lens, what was important to highlight? This was a crucial step. With an understanding of our how our project’s goals contributed to USAID’s strategies, and everything we had learned along the way, we built a framework for our final year along five themes: quality of care, health markets, public-private engagement, data to strengthen private sector engagement, and health financing.
These themes are the foundation for our dissemination activities. We started our final year with a webinar on quality of care with SIFPO2 hosted by IBP Network on October 1. Our plan includes webinars, an e-conference, a publication series called Accelerating Private Sector Engagement, and more. Each knowledge product (whether a presentation, PDF, or video) is designed to be accessible, sharable, and applicable, depending on the country context. Taking time to develop the five themes gave us a way to organize, synthesize, and package our work. There is much more to come this year as we share the rich lessons and best practices from our project.