To commemorate World Water Day 2017, Ambuja Cement Foundation joins hands with 4th Wheel Social Impact (4WSI) to host a participatory dialogue on “Co-creating water-positive communities”. As part of the event, we are facilitating three break-out sessions on water-related topics and making use of innovative tools and techniques. The objective of these workshop sessions is to build solutions and contribute to the national ‘water’ knowledge base. This blog series will present the different sessions and their methodologies.
The first break-out session explores the potential of partnerships to achieve sustainable drinking water programmes. The tool applied is a stakeholder mapping framework to identify key actors and their relations.
Our focus questions are as follows:
- Who are the primary and secondary stakeholders of drinking water programmes?
- What are their interrelations and linkages?
- What can we do to strengthen existing/missing collaborations?
STEP 1: A dynamic post-it brainstorming will firstly identify different actors and classify them into primary and secondary stakeholders.
STEP 2: Smaller groups then work on specific stakeholders and assess their relationships. Relations are depicted through symbols and arrows, differentiating between
- Close relationships
- Weak or informal relationships
- Coalitions and alliances
- Conflict and tensions
- Broken and/or damaged relationships
STEP 3: Based on the assessment of the relationship, each group will eventually work on concrete ideas to strengthen partnerships between the stakeholder groups.
The result of the exercise is a visual depiction of the stakeholder network for drinking water programmes in India. The session will engage all participants equally in the mapping process. It will enable them to reflect on the different partnership connections which exist in the sector or which need to be expanded. We believe in harnessing the potential of diversity and value all kinds of backgrounds for the workshop session.
We thank Shrestha Chowdhury, Senior Program Associate, Safe Water Network, for being the knowledge lead of this workshop.
Please find the Event Snapshot here.
