Saturday, January 26, 2008
Meeting for Poverty Development
Mercedes from the communication department asked me to write a blog about Poverty Development in Asia. The idea is to give supporters, staff and the public a look day by day into the work of the International Network for Poverty Development. I couldn't have started this blog at a worse time should truth be told. We have some major international meetings coming up, plus we are in the prepration stages of the Inepd Asia Strategic Plan. Not only this we have the organisations strategic plan to develop and the Asia and organisation operational plans. These annual plans take around 6 months to develop with a lot of back and forth from the field to HQ and back again. In all for asia there can be atleast 80 people commenting on the reports with upto 4 drafts. It is a tough job for Fran the South Asia programme officer to sort through all the comments and piece together a workable document.
I am now preparing for the Asia Inepd International Affiliates Coordination meeting that will be held in Bangkok next week. This is where all the big wigs from the region get together and punch out our global strategic plan for the coming year. Last year we held the meeting in Bali, I felt that we needed to chose a more formal work focused setting this year. It took a bit of persauding, in fact the whole of the last session of the meeting, but I'm glad we took the time to resolve this issue. The theme of next weeks meeting will be: Strategic Planning for Gender Poverty Development
I will be pushing strongly that it is vital that we ensure that a consultative approach is taken to ensure gender specific language is incorporated into the final document and that a strategic framework is development along with the plan to roll out the plan with specific elements relating to being pro gender for the poorest of the poor. I think that without this the document will just sit on the shelf gathering dust. I think it is also important to push for these kind of issues. Often there is an elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. So I hope for a suceesful coming year in poverty development that we confront the elephant.