Greetings from the Partnership and Capacity Strengthening team and welcome to our periodical newsletter on CRS and partner achievements. This issue includes information about:

• Perfecting Partnership 2017 report
• A Partnership Against Malaria in the Gambia learning brief
• Relationship Emergency job aid

The Partnership and Capacity Strengthening team

Perfecting Partnership 2017

In July 2017, 37 CRS staff members from across the globe joined the Agency’s Partnership and Capacity Strengthening Unit at Villanova University in Pennsylvania for the inaugural Perfecting Partnership: Theory Meets the Real World. This intense learning and praxis experience was designed to help the selected participants “kick up the quality of their work with partners.” A brief visual report is now available that describes the program’s goals and key outcomes, and the participants’ experiences. For those who are interested in learning more, a full detailed report is embedded.

Partnership Against Malaria in The Gambia

CRS has worked in partnership with The Gambia’s National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) since 2004 to decrease country’s malaria burden. In response, The Gambia saw malaria case incidence fall by 50% across all regions between 2011 and 2014. Globally, the incidence of malaria declined by 21% among populations at risk, and by 35% among children under 5 between 2010 and 2015. CRS support to NMCP included technical assistance, organizational capacity strengthening, and privately funded technical and financial support for proposal development (for a series of successful Global Fund applications) and face-to-face learning exchanges with other African malaria control programs.

This learning brief documents the role partnership and capacity strengthening may have played in the success of these interventions, and identifies opportunities for replication by malaria control programs in other countries. 

The intense preparation for Perfecting Partnership 2017 included the development of new learning products the first of which is now available. The Relationship Emergency job aid was developed as a reference for practitioners needing to address communication breakdowns in a partner relationship.  

Perfecting Partnership 2018

We are excited to announce that we are in the midst of planning for Perfecting Partnership 2018 and will be distributing information about the application process within the next few weeks.