Ontlametse Raleru attends partnership Brokering Training in Ghana

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From February 27th to March 3rd, this training was held in Accra, Ghana. The Partnership Broker Association (PBA), an international research and training institute focused on effective management and the development of collaborative partnership processes, facilitated the event. The 7 PtY country coordinators, the coordination lab, and consortium partners all attended the training. Sonke was represented by Ontlametse Raleru, the Youth Leadership Coordinator and Youth Representative on the GMT.

This training came after the Power to You(th) Global Management Team (GMT) decided to implement innovation and digitalization strategies with the goal of increasing efficiency and effectiveness, optimising linking and learning, and developing solutions for youth to assert their agency regarding sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

This resulted in a five-part learning trajectory on digitalization and innovation, including knowledge of how to form collaborative partnerships. This learning path on collaborative partnerships had the following objectives:

  • Identify challenges & opportunities that we encounter by implementing ‘collaborative’ partnerships. Share best practices and effective methods between countries on partnership building.
  • Build capacity of coordinators/program managers in facilitating ‘collaborative’ partnerships, including concrete tools and approaches.

There is partnership continuum, partnerships are either transactional or collaborative. it is important to know whether the partnership you are in is transactional or collaborative; the broker plays a key role in ‘positioning’ a partnership, including moving it to where it should be, by helping transactional relationships become genuinely collaborative where appropriate and by helping re-position transactional relationships that are inaccurately described as collaborative partnerships.

Key takeaways were that in partnerships, people can play different roles; some are leaders, some are thinkers, some are supporters etc. therefore, it is important to know who is at the table and make the most of their skills. The training also had an exchange session between the 7 PtY countries where they shared how their country consortiums were formed and how implementing as a consortium has been since the inception of the project. This session provided a learning opportunity on how other countries manage the partnership. Participants were encouraged to take the learnings and resources from the training to apply them in their work in PtY and other projects in the organisations.