Instant Messaging Facilitates DSD Coordination in CQUIN Member Countries

When Franck Boraud, CQUIN DSD coordinator for Côte d’Ivoire needed direction to create DSD guidelines for the West African country in 2018, it was as simple as sending a WhatsApp message. “Hervé shared Eswatini’s standard operating procedure, training curricula, and a lot of DSD tools,” says Boraud, who wrote a message on the social media forum requesting the information. Hervé Kambale, DSD coordinator for Eswatini replied, and sent the documents via email. “It’s like a 24-hour seven-days-a-week library,” Boraud said. “It is very fast.” The quick facilitation of information, knowledge and policy exchange between participants in the 14-country learning network is the reason why Peter Preko, project director for CQUIN, created the DSD Coordinator’s forum on WhatsApp in March 2018. “I thought it would facilitate easy communications with the focal persons for DSD in the respective countries,” Preko said. “People don’t respond to emails as quickly as they do to WhatsApp messages and it has been very effective.” CQUIN member countries use the WhatsApp forum to exchange best practices and to share policies, M&E documents, and network country updates. Resources such as DSD operational guides, DSD quality assessment tools, six-month ART refill models, and DSD national guidelines, are all shared on the platform. For almost two years, CQUIN member countries have leveraged each other’s resources and experience to craft tools and guidelines. Before the creation of the group, country coordinators would communicate mostly during bi-monthly teleconferences and CQUIN regional meetings, which slowed the exchange of ideas and documents. All that changed with the launch of the DSD Coordinator’s forum, which has become a platform for sharing tools and resources among CQUIN’s 14-member countries. “When I needed guidelines on six-month refills, I threw it on the group and got some response from Malawi,” says Josen Kiggundu, DSD coordinator for Uganda. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to build on what already exists in the group.”