Knowledge Management Moments at the 12th Ouagadougou Partnership Annual Meeting

Held on December 11-13, 2023 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, the 12th Ouagadougou Partnership Annual Meeting (OPAM) was a crucial convening of family planning and sexual and reproductive health and rights experts based in francophone West Africa. This year’s meeting focused on the theme, “Gender and Reproductive Health: Strategies for Social and Behavior Change for Youth.” 

Large regional conferences, like OPAM, are powerful platforms for knowledge exchange, and by using strategic planning to infuse these meetings with creative and innovative knowledge management approaches, we can elevate opportunities for sharing challenges, best practices, and lessons learned around priority family planning and reproductive health topics amongst key stakeholders. 

Keep reading for a round-up of our favorite “Knowledge Management Moments” at OPAM 2023.

Learning-from-Failure Session

Global health professionals often share their successes but are less likely to share their failures, especially with other projects and organizations. Sharing and learning from our failures in global health programs can enhance problem-solving, encourage innovations, and improve quality of care. To foster a culture of sharing failures at conferences and other events, Knowledge SUCCESS partnered with Breakthrough ACTION and Pathfinder Burkina Faso to host a parallel session at OPAM that shined a spotlight on family planning and reproductive health program implementation stories in the region that did not necessarily go as planned. Ida Rose Ndione, Health Program Manager and Interim Director of PATH Senegal and Hub West Africa, was awarded the “Best Failure” prize by OP Coordination Unit Director Marie Ba for her story describing PATH Senegal’s efforts to introduce Sayana Press in her country, and the challenges her team experienced.

Share Fair Side-Event Session

A share fair is a participatory event that is tailored to the specific needs of the participants and promotes learning from participants’ experiences to improve their work. In collaboration with ideas42, Breakthrough ACTION held a Share Fair with senior representatives from family planning departments, focal points, and civil society members, in conjunction with the OPAM. Participants explored various ways to apply Social Behavior Change beyond demand creation for successful high-impact family planning and reproductive health interventions and discovered key tools, including the Provider Behavior Ecosystem Map and Empathways cards.

Combining KM + Human-Centered Design (HCD)

As a member of the Ambassadors of HCD in francophone West Africa, Knowledge SUCCESS, alongside PATH, Ideas42, Pathfinder, MSI, Youth FP Ambassadors, and West African HCD practitioners, co-hosted a side event during OPAM focused on HCD and KM. HCD is the process of integrating human perspectives in all steps of the problem-solving process in order to better understand an issue by focusing on how it looks and feels to users within their environment and context. During the event, participants learned how to apply an HCD approach when developing innovative knowledge sharing tools that can be used to improve sexual and reproductive health needs and rights for youth and adolescents.

Newly Published!

The official recap report for the 12th Ouagadougou Partnership Annual Meeting (#RAPO2023) is now published. Co-developed by the Ouagadougou Partnership Coordination Unit and Knowledge SUCCESS, the report highlights key insights and top takeaways from the regional conference. Click here to read the report in French or English. And for even more resources, check out the conference FP insight collection.