Our Achievements
Challenges
Push back from Traditional Rulers
During Advocacy visits, the Traditional Rulers mentioned that choosing 2-3 Town Criers was insignificant to their community because their community was made up of several villages. For instance, Egbelu has 20 villages and asking 2 or 3 Town criers to cover that range will not be realistic and these Town Criers may be unwilling to work in other villages due to the vastness of the community, settlement pattern and considering they weren’t receiving support for their transportation or any form of stipend.
Inaccessible roads
During pre-project planning, our staff who conducted road trips noted that our project communities are located in the rural area and it takes about an hour 30 minutes to the nearest community (Umunakanu Owerre in Ehime Mbano LGA) and 2 hours 30 minutes to the farthest community (Egbelu Community in Ngor Okpala LGA) due to poor road network. This resulted in difficulty reaching training venue
Inadequate transport allowance
At their Orientation, the Town Criers complained that transport allowance alloted to them wasn’t sufficient to cover transport fare from the rural communities to the training center for 6 weeks. In addition, they pointed out that they reside in these communities, are little/no income earners with limited resources & unable to supplement with their money. Also they reminded the team of recent hike in cost of transportation due to ban of bikes through some routes in Imo State.
Solutions Implemented
To increase the chances of project success and ensure information reaches all communities in the villages, we chose 10 Town Criers in 3 communities for cycle 1 and we will see if same applies to 3 other LGAs in cycle 2. Furthermore, to implement a solution that would work, we redesigned the training session in 2 ways:
Location
To accommodate funds allotted to each Town Criers, we changed location of the training from our office to a central location in each community so the Town criers can use their transport allowance to take bike to the venue. Furthermore, To ensure we arrived each day on time, we set the nearer communities for morning session and farther communities for afternoon.
Training Session Redesign
Participants were grouped in batches of 10 and scheduled to learn on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays or Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. 2 of the communities that were close to each other were scheduled for Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays (Morning and Afternoon session) while the farthest community (Owalla Avuvu) was scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. (Morning session). In addition, one-on-one learning is conducted after each class using SMS blast, follow-up call and interaction on the Whatsapp group. Because most of them don’t have phone that supports whatsapp, they are paired in groups of 5 with participants that owned smartphones and asked to post their questions, feedbacks, concerns through them. participant acquires a total of 90 contact hours of training (15 hours per week) and 20 hours of hands-on field experience (10 hours per week).
Milestones
Lessons Learnt
Contact Us
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61 Wetheral Road, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria
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info@circuitpointe.com
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(+234) 813-7960683