I worked in Afghanistan back in 2007, and I stay in contact with some of my Afghan colleagues there, including a member of my communications staff from back in the day. As I’ve written about before, I’ve been mentoring her online since I left, regarding her university studies, her career pursuits and her work.
For the past few years, she’s worked for a government initiative regarding water and sanitation. Communications regarding WatSan was brand new to me, and to her, so we both had to work to get up-to-speed on best practices, particularly regarding working in low-infrastructure communities, rural communities, low-literacy communities, and with women. How have we gotten ourselves up-to-speed on this particular type of public health communications? By finding and reading online reports by various United Nations agencies and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It’s been extraordinarily easy to find relevant, detailed reports on how water and sanitation practices have been communicated in every scenario imaginable and very honest reports about what’s worked and what hasn’t.
We’re still not experts. But the reality in humanitarian work is that, very often, you are suddenly asked to do something that’s at least a bit outside your experience, and you may have just a few weeks, or a few days, or even a few hours, to get the knowledge you need to proceed. That so many humanitarian workers have shared their work online has been critical to me doing my job over the years, and it’s proving invaluable to my colleague in Afghanistan as well.
So, thank you, all you communications staff at various UN, USAID, DFID, and NGO-supported initiatives all over the world, for detailing what worked and what didn’t in whatever project you worked on, and sharing that online. You may think you no one is reading your reports. But we are.
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