8760 hours to do our advocacy – CSO capacity strengthening in Burkina Faso

On 6 and 7 February 2018, CSOs of the Voice for Change Partnership (V4CP) program in Burkina Faso had a two-day training on the efficient management of time, titled: CiEP (Change Into Excellent Performance).

Optimising the time of leaders in V4CP civil society organisations (CSOs) was the main goal of the CiEP training. After two years of implementing the V4CP project in Burkina Faso, it became apparent that leaders were seeking capacity building and direction on how to optimally coordinate project activities.

This training was vital, as it guided leaders to powerfully lead their advocacy and operational efforts as set within the framework of the Voice for Change program.

During the CiEP training, CSOs were trained and coached on practical ways to work efficiently. Guided by a specialist coming from the Netherlands, Pené Oste, conducted the training and aimed to enable the leaders of CSOs to:

• Appropriate efficient working habits and principles;

• Know and recognise efficient and inefficient working habits;

• Make personal objectives concrete and coherent with those of the program;

• Set objectives for their responsibilities and their workload;

• Organise individual work processes and use tools efficiently;

• Plan and manage responsibilities and tasks;

• Discover work rhythms and manage time proactively;

• Manage and spread information;

• Optimise management autonomy and personal leadership;

• Communicate efficiently regarding work, with themselves and others;

• Act in a result oriented way;

• Find work-life balance and increase their self-esteem;

• Reduce workload, interferences in communication, lack of clarity and energy waste.

At the end of the training, the participants were unanimous about one thing: this training will help them to optimise their time and will produce positive results in their organisations.

“This training has arrived in the nick of time and will enable us to become aware of the time we are wasting in the multitasking and in responding to unexpected hurdles in the way. The mastery of our agendas will make us be more efficient, and it will assist us to devote more time to our advocacy plans in food and nutrition security”, said Félicité KAMBOU, Coordinator of the Agricultural Services Delivery Cooperative (COPSA-C) whose CSO supports Food and Nutrition Security in the V4CP project. The same sentiments were felt by Charles KONSEIBO, Project Coordinator at the Ecological Center Albert Schweitzer in Burkina, who works in renewable energy. He said: “CiEP taught me that we can not change time but we must manage ourselves in relation to time. Now I know how to manage my time, the unexpected issues, and how to delegate tasks to my collaborators. Within the framework of the program V4CP, the training will allow us to share our schedules and to harmonise our agendas between CSOs. This will ensure jointly planned actions and synergies across organisation and activities. There are 8760 hours in the year and we are going to use them judiciously to do advocacy”.

This 2-day training is just the basis of a long individual and collective work to apply the principles of CiEP. For this purpose, every leader will be followed up and coached by the trainer over a period of 4 months in order to guide their practice and help them to keep up with their resolutions and targets. As Renée says, the “automatic pilot” will tend to bring them back to old habits. They must be vigilant.