EARLY ADOPTERS’ WORKROCK CAMEROON 2-6

DECEMBER 2019

The ‘Faith for Positive Change for Children’ (FPCC) global initiative aims to build a new form of partnership between UNICEF and faith-based actors, enabling them to work together in a more effective, systemic, and scalable way to bring sustained impact in children’s lives. UNICEF has recognised the value of working with faith actors for many years, but its 2014 mapping showed that its approach across 150 countries was mainly ad-hoc, short-term and message-based, instrumentalising faith groups, rather than working collaboratively to address the complexity of social and behaviour change. In response, its Communications for Development (C4D) section teamed up with the ‘Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities’ and ‘Religions for Peace’. In 2018, they drew together the global evidence base to show what really works, reviewed toolkits, held a UNICEF and faith partner workshop in Bangkok, documented case-studies of UNICEF’s existing work in this area, co-created a ‘Journey of Change’ for how faith actors and UNICEF can partner most effectively to impact children and set up an advisory group of 20 partner organisations and web platform to share resources.

The initiative uses the term ‘WorkRock’ instead of ‘workshop’ to emphasise that these are not training to impart information, but learning together about the foundations of what creates lasting impact for children based on strong evidence and finding a new way of partnering. Three WorkRocks had already been held in South Sudan, Malawi and Liberia. All created their own Journey of Change from their experiences and learning, corroborating the global with the high degree of coherence. Cameroon’s WorkRock was attended by 50 UNICEF staff, government officials and different actors from the faith community.

Cameroon WorkRock page

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