In the final week of this year’s advanced course we provided some introductory lessons into public consultations. These lessons were as a result of the kind and generous support we are receiving from an organisation made up of Canadian lawyers named Lawyers for Social Change.
The lessons were split into three parts. During the first part we watched and focused on understanding consultations through the presentation provided by Lawyers for Social Change. This presentation was incredibly useful to provide a background to the students. One student even requested a personal copy of the presentation (he of course received it!).
After watching the presentation, we used the structure laid out to plan a consultation together. During the class the students decided to plan a consultation about health problems within the camp and collect information that could be provided either to the administrative camp committee or to a donor organisation.
Finally, for the third part, students acted out a consultation together. Five groups of students represented 5 different stakeholders; Medics, Section Leaders, Camp Citizens, Donor organisational representatives and Environmental Health workers were all represented. Meanwhile 3 students took on the role of facilitating a house to house survey for citizens and a meeting for all stakeholders. The activity was fun and active.
At the end of the lessons, students came together to analyse their findings using an affinity diagramming technique, where they map out the results of the consultation. The findings were that the main problems are malaria and a solution would be better support of malaria specific medicine.
We would like to provide a massive thank you to the team at Lawyers for Social Change for their help in providing this subject to our students. We hope in the future we continue to strengthen together.