Partners in Creating the Future
“Collaborative Approach in Addressing Child Marriage” Workshop Wraps Up
“Collaborative Approach in Addressing Child Marriage” Workshop Wraps Up
Tuesday, 24 April 2018

The second workshop on implementing the collaborative approach to address child marriage was concluded on Tuesday and was attended by representatives of concerned national agencies and stakeholders. The workshop was organized by the Higher Population Council in cooperation with Share-Net Netherlands, a platform for sexual and reproductive health research funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The two-day workshop aimed to facilitate the adoption of a collaborative approach for the transfer and use of knowledge among stakeholders to address child marriage in Jordan. The workshop aims to provide a better understanding of the best strategies for successful transfer and use of knowledge by stakeholders and facilitates collaborative learning and sharing of acquired experiences among stakeholders and the application of best strategies in knowledge use and transfer.

HPC Secretary General, Engineer Maysoon Al Zoubi, indicated that this workshop reflects HPC’s efforts towards building national capacities in applying a collaborative national planning approach. Being an important sexual and reproductive health issue that HPC and Share-Net Netherlands seek to spread knowledge about, “child marriage” has been selected as the topic to which the collaborative approach will be applied. 

Engineer Al Zoubi noted that this approach focuses on a common sexual and reproductive health issue for stakeholders and determines work mechanisms that involve monitoring and evaluation, discussion sessions and brainstorming for working groups consisting of policy-makers, decision-makers and stakeholders in order to identify the problems related to this common issue, develop solutions and translate them into implementable strategies. Al Zoubi pointed out that this approach is not only an improvement model that relies on the dissemination and adoption of the knowledge available with different institutions to achieve a common goal, but also a learning tool for sharing experiences in how to make improvements in a specific area. 

The workshop discussed how learning tools can be used to design knowledge translation activities, overviewed tools for knowledge creation, best practices in knowledge translation tools and methods, and the monitoring and evaluation process: inputs, outputs, outcomes, and measuring change. The workshop also offered international examples and best practices in addressing child marriage.