Residents of Khayelitsha worry about a neighbour’s daughter who is only 13 but does not go to school because she cannot afford transport. She was raped by an old man. Her mother does not care and drinks a lot, swears at her about the rape and hits her. The child wants to go to school, so she went to stay in a neighbour’s home. The neighbour is also struggling and cannot afford the transport and school fees. – Banake Initiative Field Worker Diary

Last fall, Sharon Arscott-Mills of ICF International wrote a guest blog post announcing the new Family Planning Sustainability Checklist, a tool that helps project designers, implementers, and evaluators ensure long-term sustainability for their community-based family planning programs. Now Adrienne Allison describes World Vision’s recent use of this tool in the field.

Preparing to report out

© World Vision 2013

World Vision (WV) used the excellent Family Planning Sustainability Checklist during a family planning workshop for WV staff and Ministry of Health (MOH) representatives in Hawassa, Ethiopia, in February 2013. We spent the first day of the workshop exploring beliefs, attitudes, and experiences with family planning; reviewing Ethiopia’s family planning policies and guidelines; and examining the data on healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies (HTSP). The discussion of HTSP proved to be the catalyst to winning the hearts and minds of the participants, who had heard about family planning for years but had never understood how using family planning to time and space births improves maternal and child health. The second day we assessed our expectations of the circumstances we would find on a visit to Abaya, a village 100 km south of Hawassa, by rating each statement in the Checklist as “true,” “mostly true,” or “not true.” The checklist guided us to ask questions we had not considered before.   

Facebook posts, Twitter tweets—we are being deluged with knowledge sharing these days. Although, we probably shouldn’t call it “knowledge” as it’s more data or information about what a person is doing versus what a person really knows. This perhaps begs the question about whether we have become overzealous with knowledge sharing—is it harmful in the sense that we may miss the important golden gems of knowledge nuggets among the vast tunnels of over-information?

Since 2008, when I graduated with my Master of Public Health degree, I haven’t had much urge to take any academic courses. Time is a big factor, as well as money, which I feel is a large barrier to accessing advanced education for many in this country and throughout the world. In the end of January I decided to add to my knowledge on contraceptive methods and take a course from University of Southern California through Coursera. Coursera started just last year and is “a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.” Coursera’s mission is to bridge the education gap by offering classes from ivy league schools and other top universities to everyone in the world with access to the Internet. So far Coursera has won Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2013 as well as TechCrunch’s  2012 Crunchies’ “Best Overall Startup.” With a great deal of promise, it is a great start for online learning and thinking through education from a different perspective. In theory, offering education for free is wonderful, but Coursera has had some growing pains as its first courses start to roll out.