As public health professionals, we know how important it is to engage stakeholders to create sustainable change and progress for maternal and newborn health. Recognizing the power of convening stakeholders, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently published, “Multi-Stakeholder Dialogues for Women’s and Children’s Health: A Guide for Conveners and Facilitators.”
This guide is particularly useful for convening stakeholders at the sub-national and national levels to promote women’s and children’s health initiatives, identify challenges, facilitate consensus on actions for improving health, improve implementation of essential RMNCH interventions, and create a framework for accountability and results.
Use this guide to help you plan and facilitate stakeholder dialogues with these three useful steps:
- Laying the groundwork: Learn how to best plan, conduct an initial assessemnt, and chose a meeting faciltator.
- Design and facilitation: This section will help you design a dialogue process, discuss the priority interests, facilitate reaching consensus, and creating a strategy for implementing agreed upon priorities and actions.
- Implementation and accountability: In order to see the dialogue to fruition, learn how to evaluate the dialogue, implement agreements, and monitor and review progress.