Today I introduced Axel to the ministry of public health, referred to as the MOPH. He got to see the building, the garden, the EU container and meet several of the people I work with regularly. In the 9 months he has been here he never set foot inside the MOPH compound.
He accompanied several of us to a weekly consultative forum that brings together, on a weekly basis people in various functions who are trying to strengthen Afghanistan’s health system.
One of my staff spent a lot of time last year to look through the consultative group’s meeting minutes, covering 6 years, interview various stakeholders, and review the original and revised terms of reference. The resulting data was plotted on graphs and turned into percentages presenting a picture of this consultative body to itself that served as a starting point for a conversation about process and improvement.
There was much interest in this introspective meeting and more than the usual number of people showed up. The only group that was poorly represented was the government itself – not unusual and part of the problem we tried to address.
The irony is that these government officials are too busy for such meetings and thus the alignment between the various actors is weakened which then leads to calls for better communication and coordination. These are favorite and ubiquitous recommendations that can be found in any organizational assessment report anyplace in the world. Such recommendations are sufficiently vague that they don’t necessitate individual behavior change, even though that is exactly what is needed.
When I introduced Axel to MOPH colleagues there were, of course, many jokes about leading and following and Axel played the part as a faithful trailing spouse, which triggered more laughs. But then he was honored at the beginning of the meeting, introduced by the Director General as a honorary member of the consultative group and received a warm applause.
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