IAPB Regional Meeting- Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

IAPB members came together in the margins of the COECSA Congress in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to reconnect and to discuss concepts of systems leadership and their relevance to eye health. 

We particularly focused on the value of systems thinking; the concept of broadening our perspectives to consider the wider systems we operate within, and understand how different actors and organisations are influenced in different ways by different events.  

We reflected on four challenges that arose from our conversations: gender equity in training, lack of government funding, access to glasses following cataract surgery, and retention of the workforce. We experimented with a few systems thinking tools to help us analyse these challenges, and reflected on what we learned. Across these conversations some common themes emerged: 

• The importance of the local community as a major stakeholder, and the continued need to develop an understanding of eye health and generate demand for eye care services 

• The impact that a lack of coordination and visibility between service providers can have, leading to confusion for both government and public 

• The continued need for advocacy to government at a national and regional level 

• The need to build the capability for training in-country to provide more accessible and contextually relevant training 

• The need for advocacy to donors, highlighting the value of systems strengthening, and challenging attachments to programmes that favour numerical outcomes (such as the number of surgeries performed) 

• The need to acknowledge the relational and human aspect  

These discussions were grounded in an acknowledgement of the fundamental challenges that will always be there – funding, and the unpredictability of global events.  

In reflecting on what action steps we might take, and how we might continue to nurture a systems approach in our work, we considered ideas such as: 

• Creating structures for networking and strengthening our connections with each other 

• Working together to support donor coordination to prevent 

• Generating talking points for conversations with donors 

Top take-aways and recommendations for follow-up included: 

• Establishing a community of practice/space for more learning and knowledge exchange 

• Considerations for how we involve ministries and other institutions in conversations around systems strengthening and systems change 

• The need to demonstrate the value of strengthening a broad system that has an impact beyond eye care 

• The continued importance of advocacy, and development of advocacy capability