The 12th East African Hub Meeting was held from 4-6 August 2014 in Kampala, Uganda. Approximately 85 participants from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania participated in the meeting. The purpose of the quarterly hub meetings is to bring the three countries in the East African community together to learn from each other and reflect on experiences and challenges of their respective countries to improve and grow the federation in a sustainable way throughout the region. One of the focus points of this hub meeting was the importance of understanding and monitoring the activities and progress of the federation at a regional/hub level. In order to do this, the federations first sat together and scrutinized their country indicators. Each federation was able to breakdown their data to city level to understand where their national data comes from and use this data to help monitor their progress. An interactive session was held to deepen the knowledge and understanding of how federations learn, monitor, and evaluate their progress. The federations agreed that:
Learning: Is “learning by doing,” exchanges, sharing, reflecting on past experience, and documentation
Monitoring: Is visiting, reporting, auditing, country indicators, budgeting and work plans, tracking, and communicating
Evaluating: Is “the WHY?” which includes reflecting, understanding capacity and weaknesses, reviewing challenges, adapting, and looking at the way forward
The conclusion was that this is work that the federations are already doing but there is a need to tighten lose ends to make their systems more practical. It was also noted that concrete data should always be sought for credibility of the federation work.
Another key discussion being held across the SDI network is the critical importance of growing youth membership and building a second tier of leadership to facilitate the growth, evolution, and sustainability of the slum dweller movement. At this year’s East African Hub three Ugandan federation members, Sumaiya Nalubulwa, Basajjabaka Twaha, and Alan Mawejje became the first youth documenters in the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda (NSDFU). The youth documenters produced a report on the East African Hub, conducted interviews with key stakeholders, learned to upload photographs and video to social media and learned the difference between reports and blogs. We are confident the role of documenter will build their understanding and articulation of federation work and as they teach their peers this learning will spread throughout this powerful demographic.
To read the full report on the hub meeting, click here.
