+255 739 210 598
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eannaso@eannaso.org
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Plot # 595, Themi Nanenane, Njiro Road
P.O. Box 6187- 23109 Arusha, Tanzania
EANNASO targets to enhance CSOs capacities in policy formulation. One of the persistent challenges is that CSOs often have a surprisingly limited understanding of policy processes – and the incentives and constraints on key actors and institutions. As a result, they fail to engage policy processes in a strategic manner or use evidence in an effective way.
While many CSOs have the potential to generate and use evidence much more effectively than they do, they are not doing so. Many policymakers are frustrated with the nature of the evidence they receive to inform policy processes.
In most cases government agencies are risk adverse to try new ideas or approaches. CSOs can bridge the divide by implementing pilot projects as policy experiments. Doing so provides a way for CSOs to demonstrate operational solutions to policy problems.
EANNASO will continue to support campaigns at country and regional level as critical instruments for mobilising political will necessary to improve health policy and practice. EANNASO will support campaigns that reflect community, political and economic contexts, by identifying problems, target political barriers and stay engaged throughout
the policy reforms process.
Policymakers are often frustrated by the inability of many CSOs to communicate effectively in policy processes. To have greater influence, CSOs will need to make their points accessible, digestible and in time for policy discussions.
EANNASO will support collaboration initiatives that facilitate learning and transfer of knowledge between CSOs. This includes establishing learning ICT that allow CSOs to interact, access information, resources and tools. EANNASO will strengthen its information repository systems that facilitated storage of best practices, research findings, tools and guidelines.
While the big and well established CSOs and networks have skills, experiences and well resourced, they have limited access to communities at grassroots level. To address this challenge and gap, EANNASO will support partnerships between networks and community groups that facilitate community mobilisation and enhance community reach by networks through partnerships with local community groups.
Resource mobilisation is important for CSOs. Some organisations are highly successful in this, whereas others struggle significantly. EANNASO, targets to establish a partnership among CSOs at country and regional level that allow for joint efforts in resource mobilisation.
Advocacy for policy change around health and human rights issues require
multistakeholder approach, and effective coordination among partners. EANNASO targets to scale up collaborative advocacy approach to facilitate building of a stronger community voice and ensure EANNASO combine efforts in advocacy for challenges in health and human rights sub-sectors.
EANNASO will, in this planning period, support the capacity building initiatives that target to enhance the capacities of communities to respond to pandemics, and emergencies. EANNASO seeks to ensure that civil society and community groups are well prepared to respond to and mitigate the impact of pandemics and emergencies, through trainings,
awareness creation, access to resources and enhancing community representation in decision and policy making platforms.
Communities and community groups are at the forefront of any response to public health challenges, including health emergencies and pandemics. The HIV and Ebola pandemic have proven that, in the absence of medical treatment, all cases are pushed back to communities for homebased care.
EANNASO will continue to support access to programming tools and resources including best practices and guidelines to support programming by civil society and community groups.
It is evident that civil society and community groups do not access technical support to enhance programming and engagement in policy processes, mainly due to the high cost of technical support and limited knowledge and appreciation of hoe technical support can enhance programming.
ENNASO, in this planned period, will streamline and institutionalise knowledge
management and sharing processes, this will include:
Establishment of thematic networks: EANNASO will develop thematic networks,
choosing from among the themes of HIV, TB, sexual and reproductive health and
rights (SRHR), health care financing, human rights and public health policy. The
thematic networks will serve as laboratories for systematic learning by EANNASO
and its members on the linking of knowledge development at the national and
regional levels.
EANNASO will put in place a more supportive infrastructure to achieve its knowledge management objectives in three areas: (i) a stronger information technology platform including the civil society and community groups portal; (ii) better information management; and (iii) specific knowledge management tools for collaboration.
Building on its many existing partnerships, EANNASO will adopt a much more focused and selective approach to partnerships in knowledge management. With a view to systematic learning, EANNASO will begin by developing three (3) quite different strategic 20 partnerships in knowledge management with selected partners:
Better use of research-based knowledge by EANNASO and its members can increase the policy influence and pro-communities’ impact of their work in several ways: First, it can help improve the impact of EANNASO’s service delivery work. Rigorous evidence can help EANNASO and its members understand problems more clearly, design better interventions, make practice more effective and monitor their results. Second, better use of research-based knowledge can increase the legitimacy of EANNASO’s policy engagement efforts
