Reflections on the Completed Nuru Ethiopia CED Program Planning Process

The week of August 20th marked the end of the Program Planning Process (PPP) for our Community Economic Development (CED) program. It has been a very full 6 months with little time to reflect on all that we have accomplished thus far. This is also the first time that the local Leadership Program team has been in charge of leading the PPP. And, having the opportunity to look back now at the process, this has been an extremely successful period of professional growth and development for all parties involved.

The CED team, having only recently been introduced to the concept of servant leadership and to Nuru’s Quality Solutions Criteria (QSC), has created an extremely promising program true to Nuru’s philosophy using the most humble servant leadership approach to connect with and develop our farmer households. The M&E (Monitoring and Evaluation) team, although they were only present during certain periods of PPP, has immensely improved in their capacity to facilitate technical trainings and ensured all participants deeply understand and can apply new concepts to their program. The Agriculture team has been a great source of advice and help for the CED team, leveraging their previous experiences building co-operatives and providing advice on opportunities for integration between the two programs. Our Country Director and our head of Finance contributed to the process by facilitating specific portions of the PPP. And, the Leadership team has demonstrated their prowess at building the capacity of other team members to create, lead, and manage their own programs and to reach their strategic program goals, all doing so with a humble attitude of servant leadership. It has truly been a collaborative effort from all, and we are all excited to watch now the launch of our second impact program, CED, this month.

And now that the Leadership team has finished leading this PPP, our next months will be focused on beginning Project Management Training for new staff members, training our new community animators in Level 1, and beginning to plan the PPP for our upcoming Healthcare and Education programs. Biruk Enaro, the Training Manager for Leadership, and I will also be taking an experience-sharing trip to learn from Nuru’s Kenya project. We are very excited about this great opportunity and, from the experience of our Agriculture program managers last year, we expect to learn a lot of important lessons from our Kenyan counterparts. More on that experience in our next posting.