Kenya: Innovating Writeshop for Documentation of Impact

IIRR pioneered the writeshop methodology and has been using it to build the capacity of organizations by promoting learning and reflection. There is growing pressure on development organizations to show evidence of their works. This requires systematic documentation, packaging and dissemination, which are weakness of many development organizations. Innovating Writeshop for Documentation of Impact is given as a five-day training program by IIRR.

There are mainly two reasons that necessitate writeshops:

1. For project or organizational learning to improve performance, results and impact

2. For wider sharing or mainstreaming of experiences and knowledge and in networking and cooperation among the different development stakeholder groups beyond the local or project setting.

The writeshop is a participatory process that brings together staff, facilitators, project partners and community members together with facilitators, editors and design specialists under one roof or a tree shade to produce simple, user-friendly materials in a short period of time.

This training program is designed to capture, distill, peer review, and widely share lessons of evidence from the field. It builds on the experiences of various actors involved in a project or program implementation to come together and document their change stories from the field and share widely with their communities, institutions, donors, local government collaborators and other stakeholders.

By the end of the training program, participants are expected to have improved their writing and analytical skills; have enhanced capacity to capture evidence from their work; have improved their confidence in conducting their own writeshops. They will also be able to polish draft cases they will bring to the writeshop and develop an action plan.

The training program will focus on the following learning outcomes:

• Participants use written and oral communications to tell community-relevant stories and explain complex situations, helping them act as facilitators of change processes at the community level.

• Participants can analyze information and reach their own evidence-based conclusions.

• Use facilitation skills, consensus building, peer reviews and the promotion of respectful dialogue

• Identify issues that are relevant to the community, and frame them in feasible projects and programs

• Utilize a variety of evidence bases, and develop collaborative work plans with partner groups

• Deliver effective presentations to general and specialized audiences

• Articulate and defend the significance of community projects

• Write effective reports, from meeting minutes to grant proposals

COURSE OUTCOMES

Training participants are guided on the writeshop methodology, which will enable them to efficiently organize, facilitate and manage the pre-production, production and post-production requirements of the desired document. The writeshop will enable them to consolidate experiences by compiling resources, reference materials, and stories of best practices.

By the end of the course, participants are expected to have:

• Improved their writing and analytical skills

• Acquired basic skills and capacity in producing written materials

• Appreciated the roles and responsibilities of all writeshop players

• Improved their confidence in conducting their own *writeshop*s; and

• Improved knowledge to replicate/share learning from the course

Email training@iirr.org