Last week, we started our second annual campaign, in which we shine light on the work and lives of our colleagues and friends in partner organisations. In the first blog in the series, we heard from Hisham (PYCA), and today we welcome to the website Julie from Forum for African Women in Educationalists (FAWE). Our Senior Project Lead, Gemma, offers an introduction to inHive’s work with FAWE since February of this year. Julie’s blog then depict some of the issues in their sector and countries, as the regional secretariat she is part of support activities across the African continent.
Networks to support everyone: creating collaborative spaces
By Gemma May and Julie Khamati, Programme Assistant (Alumni Coordinator) at FAWE, Kenya
When we first started working with Julie, we found a big community of women and men who had a strong affinity to FAWE’s vision and a desire to connect with one another. It reached across the continent of Africa and spanned local chapters in 33 countries. This insight came through inHive’s initial assessment of the network in which we came up with a number of recommendations to help strengthen this desire and find more ways the alumni could action these connections by tapping into current FAWE work with staff.
With such a big task ahead of us, Julie and I decided that the best way to create good working relationships with staff and alumni chapters was to train several key motivated staff as trainers that could guide other staff and alumni on the benefits of the network and how they could work together to create communications and activity plans that result in more opportunities to connect.
Creating A Collaboration
Julie and I created several Training of Trainer (ToT) workshops that included a whistle stop tour of what a network is and how it supports FAWE’s work overall, and the tangible activities they could think about to start the connections and collaborations This task sounded simple, but we quickly realised Covid-19 was going to push us online and that online training is not quite as easy as it looks. Our first challenge was to create buy-in from the staff to be able to give 6 hours of their time over a 3-week period. Staff are understandably busy and have daily responsibilities to support their current students, so being able to clearly and concisely convey the outcomes of the workshop and emphasise they would become the ‘champions’ within their team to work with alumni was important. We learnt getting people to understand where they fit in the bigger picture is key to getting buy in.
The next step was making sure the workshops were interactive and that people didn’t feel lectured to. With ‘zoom fatigue’ being a real problem in today’s world we made sure to create lots of space for questions and reflections to hear what each staff member had seen work (or not) before. This space then ended up becoming a great way to collect stories about what each chapter was doing and for peer learning and collaboration to begin. The slides from the workshop were then handed over to them with a guidebook on the key points to get across, but essentially, they could adapt the slides however they felt to engage their particular audience.
The final step was to create a space for the new trainers to meet for support and advice as they begin to reach out and plan their training for other chapters. We asked the trainers what they felt would work for them and this ended up being a Whatsapp group. Now the trainers have this space to share any blockers or ideas they have for engaging their new audiences, so they don’t feel alone and can build on their facilitation skills. We hope that this space also creates a place for sharing success and excitement as to what is possible with the FAWE alumni network.
Julie’s Story
As a passionate advocate for girls and women’s education I joined FAWE to be part of a pan African effort to raise awareness and standards so boys and girls have the same opportunities when it comes to learning. Since the formation of FAWE Alumni network, FAWE has been conducting annual events where selected alumni from different countries meet to network, share information, and keep the network lively, but this was not as active as we wanted it to be. The annual events were the only avenues where alumni from different FAWE National Chapters would meet and share what was happening in the National chapter’s alumni networks. Over the years most alumni have expressed interest in frequent trainings and meetings that would promote learning and sharing across the FAWE Africa network.
Covid-19 Challenges
Early this year, FAWE started working with InHive to help increase alumni engagement and get some of these events happening and I started weekly meetings with Gemma. In the face of Covid-19, we decided we had to adopt a new online strategy to ensure continuous alumni engagement without physical meetings. We also realised we needed to get staff buy in to help engage more alumni and find ways for collaboration between FAWE and the alumni network. At first we were sceptical about online training and if it could work to bring staff and alumni together, but the events have been successful and actually enabled alumni to come together and share their ideas on ways to get more alumni to participate into FAWE’s work and their own inspiring stories.
There were a few challenges we faced with implementing some of the strategies, such as alumni time, where it became difficult to get alumni to join frequent meetings due to their busy schedules and zoom fatigue, and the language barriers where translation and interpretation were required for every meeting and event. Having Gemma and the inHive team helped me to brainstorm through challenges and keep track of what we have actually achieved. Despite the challenges experienced over the past 10 months, it is evident that alumni activities and engagement have increased this year and more alumni are coming on board to support FAWE’s work. Following an online training on how to update alumni data, over 20 alumni have now submitted their recent data and committed to support FAWE’s work. Thanks to InHive for the support and guidance.