Saturday, October 24, 2015

Oct. 9. 2015. CORE Group Global Health Practitioner Conference [Day 2]

By sunrise Day 2, I was bright and breezy this morning. I thought it was so lucky for me to attend the conferences in DC because I would just drive and easily get there. For the next year in Spring, Core Group Conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, so far way from here. From CCIH in June to CORE Group in October, I might have not been grateful enough to attend conferences just because the places were located too close. Okay, so I have only one day left for the conference, and I will absorb all kinds of information! Day 2 was for “Behavior Change in the Age of Complexity: Implications for Monitoring and Evaluation” all day long.

It was interesting topic for me to understand how to approach to monitoring and evaluating (M&E) Social and behavior change (SBC) in an alternative way. You know, it must be very hard to measure subtle and indefinable changes in people’s emotions, so SBC M&E needs to be more adjusted for effective measurement of impact and generation of learning. The new way of approaching SBC M&E would be strengthened mixed methods coming from various disciplines, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology to embrace complex interactions and transformative change. For example, social/gender norm has been shifted, and the human right of underserved population, such as LGBT and MSM has been improved, so adapting and optimizing behavior change interventions would be fundamentally necessary to integrate community member’s engagement and feedback.

Through the conference, people’s efforts to share the new approaches to SBC M&E and applying the best local systems framework will improve the quality of life on the opposite side of the earth sooner or later. I met a few people from Johns Hopkins; they are from Center for Communication Programs (CCP) and Jhpiego. Though we did not talk much with each other, it was good to see people from the place that I am well aware of attend the conference to share their experience with global health practitioners from other organizations.

See you all in Portland!

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