Project Update: Community of Practice – Innovating in Education Investment across IPPs
What are the successful ingredients for collaboration in REIPPPP? We aim to get closer to answering that question!
In the REIPPPP programme an IPP (Independent Power Producer) supports a community trust, which is a vehicle for facilitating community ownership. Both the IPP and the trusts are responsible for significant funding to spend on socio-economic development within their geographic area. Often you will find IPPs sharing geographic regions, hence it is critical that these funds are spent in a coordinated manner on strategic and impactful programmes.
Unfortunately collaboration and co-ordination are less easy than they sound. With social performance practitioners in IPPs spread thin across a multitude of tasks such as reporting, engaging with community members on their concerns, dealing with protest action and implementing programmes in order to meet REIPPPP’s quarterly spend requirements, there is very little time and energy to focus on collaboration and shared strategies.
That is why the Community of Practice (CoP) programme has been welcomed by the Inland 5 partnership of IPPs around the areas of Bedford, Cookhouse, Adelaide and Somerset East. We are so grateful to DGMT for the funding of this initiative.
Through the CoP, INSPIRE has been able to support these IPPs to reflect, strategise and plan clearly and collectively about how they invest impactfully in strategic education investments, with ambitions to extend this approach to community health, entrepreneurship, and other development areas.
The CoP programme has launched a webinar series, INSPIRING CHANGE, presented by DGMT and their panels of expert educationalists. These informative webinars cover everything from maternal health, drug and substance abuse, conducive learning environments, eradicating school dropout and so much more. The webinars are open to all as we believe that everyone funding education needs to understand these very insightful principles.
We also host regular online deep dives where the CoP team explore the topics covered in the webinars and discuss and compare this to their current programmes addressing these issues. These sessions were not only limited to education discussions: we appreciate that a key part to collaboration is building the strength of the team and our partnership muscles and psyche. As individuals working in this space, we understand that the strain of compassion fatigue is real and burnout a dangerous epidemic that urgently needs support.
The CoP programme also comprises of in-person strategy time. The first being our Inception Meeting in East London at the end of July, which kicked off our CoP, and more recently we spent 2 intensive days in Port Alfred, Eastern Cape in October. The last session included rigorous discussions with various education project managers, introduced to us by DGMT, to assess which programmes would best address the education problems experienced by the Inland 5 communities. Participants also played energetic, competitive games to simulate how we work on the ground and build their understanding of the collaboration obstacles they encounter. They learnt much about their personality types in the process.
After only three months into this programme, we are delighted to share that we are now steps closer to creating/sharing the first strategic education programme emerging from this Inland 5 Community of Practice, with many more to follow!
