Dear All,

Please see results of the self assessment the 11 Health Districts carried out as representatives of Cameroon (Assessing Cameroon) and as separate health districts.

Regards

Ibrahim

Dear Friends,

I have just returned from Cameroon where I introduced the AIDS and Malaria competence process to over 40 people and carried out a training of Malaria Competence self assessment facilitators training for 34 persons from 11 Health Districts in Cameroon where Plan Cameroon works (please see attachments). According to the action plans drawn by these people they will go back to their respective Health Districts, train more facilitators to help actualize the competence process in their work areas. Participants included District Medical Doctors, Local NGOs, Community representatives and Plan Cameroon staff.

I have told Plan Cameroon about Doctor Follack (one of our Cameroon country facilitators) and Plan Cameroon National Health Coordinator (Dr. Esther Tallah) has promised to get in touch with Dr. Follack to see how they can work together in scaling up the process in Cameroon.

Dr. Tallah's contact is:

Dr. Esther Tallah

Health Coordinator, Plan Cameroon

Telephone: +237-221-5458/+2377807537

Fax: +237-221-5457

Email: Esther.Tallah@... or

esthertallh@...

Every one I shared this process with including five of our Plan US senior health staff have shown interest in joining hands to promote the concept and are requesting that we help them join the Constellation or at least the information sharing platform since I told them about all of that. Please let me know how you think we can go about that. All the trained facilitators can be reached through Dr, Tallah while our Plan US staff can be reached through me or directly (in that case, I will provide their email addresses).

During the Cameroon sharing and training preparation, I attempted to adapt the Competence Self Assessment Tool to "Community Competence Framework" since the participants were in dire need of a tool they can use for general community competence besides the specific ones for AIDS and malaria which we covered.  I told them it was an adapted tool and it is open to inputs and besides I was going share it with the initiators of the concept (The Constellation) for their reactions/inputs. Please see attachment for your comments/inputs.

We were also introduced to another framework called “Child Survival Sustainability Assessment (CSSA) Framework”. This framework has six components i.e. Health Outcomes, Health/Social Services, Organizational Capacity, Organizational Viability, Community Competence/Capacity and the External Environment. The CSSA involves assessing the six components critical among which is the Community competence/capacity. As a result, when I introduced our competence process and especially the malaria and “adapted community” self assessment competence tools, the resource persons we had requested that we find away of adapting the CSSA framework to include our competence process and tools. This a new opportunity opened to us since the CSSA was initiated by CORE group and partners and the document has been standardized. Meaning, including the competence tools in the framework, is going to be another means of promoting the competence process across the globe especially in Child Survival programmes and more especially if funded through USAID that is promoting the CSSA frame.

I am looking forward to your inputs on this development.

I will be in the field form now till Friday (17.03.06) but I will reply to your concerns with regards to comments on this issue. I am also looking forward to your own experiences. 

My best regards

Ibrahim Kamara