Retrospective: Partnership and friendship - Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in The Gambia
When illuminAid conducts workshops with NGO partners, we don’t just view the partnership as a business relationship between clients. In the non-profit world, we build long-lasting friendships with our partners that uplifts both of our organizations and inspires us to execute the best possible humanitarian work for the most underprivileged people in the world. A particular workshop we conducted in the past that exemplifies not only a greatly successful collaboration but a true friendship as well would be our partnership in 2017 with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (MOHSW) in The Gambia.
This project is absolutely worth revisiting, as the videos we helped MOHSW create have been highly impactful for beneficiaries and are absolutely still relevant today. Conducted in conjunction with partner and friend Buba Darboe, MOHSW Program Manager, we taught their staff how to create videos on maternal health, malaria prevention, proper use of insecticide bed nets and general hygiene.
Some of the many videos they created under our tutelage can be found here. We trained 25 MOHSW staff members at the time, and the workshop was conducted in Banjul, The Gambia. We even received data later from MOHSW indicating that behaviors among local community members in The Gambia absolutely changed positively as a result of the videos created, and that has certainly helped protect people from numerous risks of disease in the country.
illuminAid has very fond memories of working with Buba and the rest of the MOHSW team. We hope to work with them again sometime in the next couple of years. If you’re an NGO thinking about partnering with illuminAid, you have more to look forward to than a simple partnership on video training, capacity building and social behavior change communication. You also get to look forward to friendships being cultivated and a robust partnership that can reap rewards for years to come, and our collaboration with MOHSW in The Gambia certainly reflects that.