PEARL Fellows during a session. Image Credit: Abhinav Pandey
Abhinav Pandey, a Program Officer from the YP Foundation, reflects on his time as a Knowledge SUCCESS KM Champion, a KM Champion mentor, and how he’s working to incorporate knowledge management (KM) into his work in India. The YP Foundation, a youth-led organization based out of New Delhi, India, focuses on facilitating youth leadership on gender, sexuality, and gender-based violence from the lens of rights-based, intersectional, and feminist values.
Abhinav reflected on his time as a KM Champion and how he learned from strategies that were shared during the cohort, as well as from his fellow KM Champions across the Asia region.
“A lot of work that we do, as in the [YP Foundation] organization [in India], we often don’t call it knowledge management, or KM, or something like that, but we often end up doing the same sort of documentation work. When I joined this particular cohort, it gave me an idea of how we can leverage this platform and how we can learn from the strategies which have been shared as a part of the capacity building exercises. I can recall some of the strategies shared with us [such as] community of practice, knowledge cafe, and peer assist.”
He shared that the YP Foundation led several different campaigns last year in which they facilitated conversations and produced resources in collaboration with other young people. They convened 50,000 young people in India and collected responses from them on what they envisioned for their health and wellbeing, in collaboration with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (PMNCH), for the ”1.8 billion young people for change campaign.”
As a part of the KM Champions, Abhinav received training in different KM strategies, including communautés de pratique, knowledge cafes, and resource curation and dissemination (using Knowledge’s SUCCESS’ Plateforme d'informations sur la PF).
Discussing communities of practice in his KM Champions cohort helped Abhinav to implement the campaign with PMNCH where he onboarded 20 young people from more than 10 states of India, bridging geographic barriers by designing interventions to reach out to members. He encouraged these 20 young people to learn from each other and value opportunities to share experiences, as well as produce quality content from these connections.
“The Knowledge Cafe [approach] has been one of the integral parts of the conversations that we implement. So whenever we organize these consultations, whether it is with young people or with civil society organizations, we often include a knowledge cafe as a part of our exercise in order to gain responses from the people specifically around collecting recommendations for the government/decision-makers.”
Abhinav also highlighted how instrumental the FP insight platform has been in discovering new resources and learning about what works and does not work in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights from others around the world. He is an active user of the platform and has continued to be since he learned about it last year during a KM Champions FP insight training session.
Finally, Abhinav shared just how important knowledge sharing sessions with other KM Champions was to him and his work. The ability to learn from others’ experiences and approaches has allowed him to implement and adapt strategies for his own work. Abhinav recalled, for example, learning how people from different organizations led KM activities not only at their own organizations but also at the national level in their countries.
“These [KM Champion] conversations have been helpful and it was, you may call it, a coincidence, but it has been a sort of very amazing opportunity for me because at the same time a lot of processes were going on [in India and at the YP Foundation], these learnings from these capacity building sessions as a part of KM cohort were instrumental.”
Pendant le second cohort of KM Champions in the Asia region, Abhinav served as an engaged mentor to new KM Champions.
“I really liked the idea of how we sort of act as a buddy to the new KM champions. … They have been really incredible in their work.”
Abhinav also interacted with the new cohort through a collaborative exercise to collate resources on family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH). This conversation included selecting specific topics, identifying resources, and creating a collaborative collection on FP insight. They focused their collection on advocacy for family planning and introducing new contraceptive methods. Abhinav mentioned that he learned a lot from these conversations and that the WhatsApp group that was created during this process to coordinate on the collection is still active, with people sharing ideas and experiences from their work.
“More than 100 resources were collated together for this particular topic, and it was really incredible to know their journey altogether. So I would really like to appreciate this particular platform. I feel we should definitely continue this particular approach as a part of the KM Champions.”
The KM Champions model brings together diverse FP/RH professionals across Asia. As a model, Abhinav described that it can improve organizations’ KM by providing a critical platform to exchange experiences and produce and share vital resources. The YP Foundation leads a coalition of 24 youth-led organizations across 10 countries in Southeast Asia named the Southeast Asia Youth Health Action Network (SYAN), and the network is engaged in conversations around integrating KM strategies and exercises collectively.
“More and more emphasis was on how we can build this momentum together. And that can only be possible while producing some of these conversations as a resource, as a knowledge management product. Those conversations were an integral part of the consultation that we did. [A platform like the KM Champions] where people have learned a lot of strategies is so helpful.”
Abhinav mentioned how important learning was to ensure FP/RH programming is effective. Different countries might be implementing different strategies, but there are lessons to be learned across contexts. He shared that there is national data available for many countries in the Asia region, and people are using this data in leading policy advocacy and public engagements in their respective countries. However, he urges FP/RH professionals to consider that leveraging these good practices outside their own countries can only be possible when there are documented and collated resources and networks to share them.
“I feel like the resources which are available, they’re mostly focused on the national aspects. For the Asia region in particular, I think it lacks those kinds of networking platforms. The KM Champions cohort brought together organizations from different countries, and this approach is lacking for family planning and reproductive health services. It is important for all the countries to reflect together on how we can lead these conversations together. How can we push the agenda of family planning and reproductive health in some of these dialogue and advocacy platforms? This kind of mapping is also important for how we can disseminate this information, because at the Asia level there are only a few platforms where these resources are disseminated.”
Furthermore, Abhinav described how social norms and myths and misconceptions exist that make discussions on sexual and reproductive health difficult. In many countries, including India, the topic remains taboo. Resources in regional languages and diverse formats depending on specific audiences are helpful in leading conversations where social norms are resistant and myths and misconceptions persist.
“For example, in a country like India, where there are more than 22 official languages, having these resources in regional and indigenous languages is very important and knowledge management can definitely play a very big role in producing some of those knowledge products in leading these conversations. We have leveraged those learnings and we have also tried to curate content so that it is not boring for people. Specifically talking about young people, they like content which is engaging, which is more sort of comic-based.”
He also mentioned how important it is for governments to expand conversations and experience sharing so that not only are people able to learn from each other but also governments can learn from communities directly.
“Knowledge management can definitely bridge that gap in documenting some of those community experiences, the challenges, and bringing it to the government people, bringing it to the influential leaders and decision makers, and explaining how these resources will then be helpful for the government to actually implement some of the FP/RH strategies.”
In his final reflections, Abhinav shared that collaborative approaches like KM Champions or Cercles d'apprentissage should continue. He emphasized that individual FP/RH professionals gain valuable training from these types of activities but also that organizations, and communities more broadly, benefit from FP/RH professionals’ participation in these activities.
“I really feel that Knowledge SUCCESS should continue this approach in their work, and how we can collectively leverage the strength of the organizations altogether in leading and improving the quality of family planning and reproductive health in the Asia region.”