The INFO Project Blog

Paul Mundy and Evelyn Mathias have created an excellent resource on their website, Dev Comm, about collaborative workshops for developing communcation materials called writeshops. According to Mundy and Mathias, writeshops can can reduce the time needed to produce information and increase the value of the content at the same time. It’s a process for taking a draft and in an intensive editing and critique process - which can take from a few days up to a few weeks - come up with a final version. Sounds good to me!

To read more about how it works, visit the writeshop process page or read a short article about it. Mundy has also created a list of materials that have been produced as a result of writeshops, including some on family planning.

If you are interested in developing materials that document your work, you should also take a look at this excellent resource from the International HIV/AIDS Alliance - Documenting and communicating HIV/AIDS work (courtesy of One Source).

Kannada is spoken in Southern India’s Karnataka province, famously home to booming Bangalore, aka South Asia’s Silicone Valley. Bangalore appears to be booming, given its roaring new-economy growth of 8% per year, but the city’s “crumbling” infrastructure and poor surrounding regions are suffering. It’s no wonder, given the city and surrounding state’s rapid growth in population.

So, then, how do you say “Family Planning” in Kannada?

Actually, the translation work has been done–that is, job aids, checklists and guidance on methods from the Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers have already been translated into Kannada under the guidance of Chief Medical Officer Dr. K. Ravi Kumar (counseling clients above right).

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In “KM Goes Social,” knowledge management guru David Gurteen explains how the second generation web technologies (Web 2.0) are making knowledge management (KM) more transparent and democractic. Given its widespread new appeal–whether folks know they are using a KM system or whether they are just IMing a friend–the second generation of KM (2.0) is more indispensible than ever. 

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Reporter Collins Vumiria wrote a great editorial for Panos’s AfricaVox blog, in reprinted in Uganda’s Monitor, about the urgent need for the government to involve traditional birth attendants in preventing HIV.

She writes,

rural village women still struggle to get the money for transport to hospitals, even when they are only a few kilometres away. If birth attendants were fully trained and integrated into the healthcare system, they could be equipped with better knowledge of HIV prevention and to advise women about the drugs that can help prevent their children contracting HIV. 

Vumiria spoke with a 52 year-old birth attendant with two years of schooling who last attended a workshop on HIV counselling in 1992. The woman, who Vumiria writes was “confused about how the virus could be diagnosed,” sought further training yet was brushed aside by local medical workers.

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Demand for the English edition of INFO’s new guide, Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers, has come from nearly every corner of the globe. Health care providers, researchers, and programmers from more than 180 countries have ordered the guidebook, which is available at no cost to developing country readers. More than 65,000 copies, and more than 78,000 accompanying wall charts, were distributed in the first six months of publication.

INFO is collaborating with professional organizations and universities around the world to disseminate the resource to the widest audience possible: Currently, the project is overseeing the translation of at least 10 foreign language editions.

 UNFPA is supporting the production of Portuguese, Russian, French and Arabic editions–an imperative considering INFO has received over 2000 orders for Arabic-language handbooks alone.

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