“Never stop learning, for when we stop learning, we stop growing.”

Over the course of the IDEAL program we have learnt a lot… about the program, about the context in which we work, about ourselves, and about each other.

However, the need was felt for a more regular mutual exchange; both between the local country teams and with the teams in The Hague. Therefore the IDEAL Learning team together with country team Uganda organized a first online session on 6 July, called 'Exchange & Learn', with hopefully more to follow. The topic for this first session was ‘inclusion & participation’ in all its shapes (you can think of citizens and other stakeholders, women, marginalised groups and people with disabilities, the involvement of partners such as LGAs, etc.). We started with a presentation about examples from Uganda by the Resident Programme Manager and consequently went into (online) sub groups to discuss challenges, best practices and lessons learnt on the topic in the 7 countries.

The event was found to be very inspirational and refreshing so we are now looking at ways to make this exchange an integrated part of our learning agenda.