From the 24th to the 28th of January, Uganda Youth and Adolescents Health Forum (UYAHF) held its annual team and capacity building for staff in Mbale on key programmatic skills, financial management, and 2021 work planning.
The Four-day workshop attended by 16 UYAHF staff and youth champions aimed at strengthening team coordination and building their capacity ineffective communication and documentation, Project planning and management, resource mobilization, and financial management for them to meaningfully advocate for adolescents and youth sexual and reproductive health (SRH).
Understanding the mandate of UYHAF was one of the sessions during the workshop whose facilitator was UYAHF’s Team Leader, Patrick Mwesigye. His presentation was centered on;
- UYHAF’s Goal, vision, and Mission
- UYHAF’s core values
- The role of staff in contributing to the organization’s vision and mission
- UYAHF policies (HR and code of conduct)
The workshop also provided a platform for UYHAF staff to review their performance and progress for the year 2020. While sharing their quarterly reports, staff actively participated in sharing their working experiences and lessons learned, challenges encountered; as well as best practices to guide improvement in certain areas. Winnie Apio, the then UYHAF program manager facilitated this session and took participants through setting a ground and pace for 2021 program implementation (developing the 2021 workplan).
Teamwork is one of the core values at UYAHF with an overall aim of upholding the spirit of UYAHFISM and so the team also had some team building activities which all aimed at embracing teamwork, strengthening coordination, building trust among team members, effective communication, and being competent individual (team) through persistence and perseverance.
Through the capacity building sessions on basics of project management, effective communication and documentation, resource mobilizations, and financial management; the facilitators stressed the importance of;
- Accuracy and quality in communication and documentation
- Developing a communications plan and effective use of the media.
- Understanding the basics of being a good project manager
- Making better use and maximizing existing resources
- Adapting to the culture of mobilizing resources to ensure the sustainability of the work we do.
In action planning, the staff pledged to improve on their communication and documentation strategies by practicing the lessons learned. They also agreed that each one of the staff and change champions should take it as their responsibility to develop content for postings on the UYAHF social media pages, follow them up by liking and tagging other people for the posts to get recognition and reach the targeted audience. The champions appreciated the management of UYAHF for actively involving them. 90% of the participants rated the training highest in attaining the workshop’s intended objectives.
