A multi-country East African standards cohort
Multi-year capacity-building programme with the digital-health authorities of three neighbouring East African countries.
Role
Programme design lead & senior mentor
Region
East Africa
Period
2020 – 2023
Scale
Regional · 3 countries
The programme
Three neighbouring East African countries, each running its own national digital-health programme, wanted to build shared standards-development capacity. Rather than commission three parallel country programmes, a donor coalition funded a multi-year regional cohort that would work on the same standards challenges together.
The role
Ron served as programme design lead and senior mentor. The programme covered:
- curriculum design for a multi-week practitioner course on architecture, standards, and governance;
- mentored delivery in three cohorts across three years;
- regional council design: the standing body that would carry the work forward after the programme ended;
- on-call mentorship for national architecture leads across the cohort.
The craft
Three choices worth naming:
- Cohort, not classroom. Participants were selected as national architecture leads or deputy leads: people whose day job was the subject matter. The programme’s outputs were their own national artefacts, developed in the course.
- Shared vocabulary, national ownership. The programme insisted on a shared reference vocabulary (adopted from the WHO/ITU handbook) so that participants could compare notes across borders. Each country retained ownership of the actual standards decisions and profiles.
- A regional council as the exit condition. The programme was explicitly designed to leave behind a standing regional council, with rotating chair, published charter, and a modest working budget, so that the standards work would outlive donor funding.
The outcome
By the end of the programme all three countries had national architecture leads mentored to peer-recognised competence and the regional council had been convened. The council has since carried on the cohort’s work independently of continuing donor support.
What it teaches
The engagement is a case study in capacity-building that is designed to be self-sustaining. The success measure is not “the programme ran”; it is “the practice continues without us”. That test is the one Parker DHC applies to all capacity-building work.
Also see
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