Partners’ Review cum Planning Meeting is one of the most important processes for the Sabal programme which addresses the chronic malnutrition and hunger in the regions of Khalwa block of Khandwa – Madhya Pradesh. This review asses the key achievements and results of the last five months and chalk out the plans for the next four months.

The two days event (7th & 8th June 2022) was attended by 20 participants including partner directors, outreach workers, field facilitators and community facilitators at Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh. The Caritas India Sabal management team also facilitated a session on strategizing plans using DIP and measuring the programme performance using earned value management tools.

Dr. Saju MK, the Thematic Lead of the program reiterated the 5Cs proposed by Fr. (Dr.) Paul Moonjely, Executive Director of Caritas India for the sustainability of the programme.

• Celebrate– Community has the right to celebrate their achievements.
• Critic– Positively criticize and introspect on what did go well and what did not. Failures are the stepping stone toward success.
• Consolidate– Consolidating our experiences, practices, learnings, successes, and achievements.
• Conserve– Conserving the community’s culture, tradition, wisdom, knowledge, practices, and identity.
• Continue– Ensuring the continuity of the behaviour change practices by the community.

He emphasized developing replicable models of changes that can be instrumental to escalate Sabal impact at the Meso and Macro levels.

All the partners presented their result achievements along with challenges and learnings for collective reflection. As part of agriculture and good governance, intensive efforts towards net planning for MGNREGA, Kharif season preparations, millet improved seeds procurement and implementation of sustainable agriculture practices by developing demonstration plots were proposed. Under health and nutrition, identification of newly wedded couples for counselling, involving traditional birth attendants for neo-natal care, 1000 days calendars installation in pregnant mothers’ household and traditional healers’ visibility was suggested.

“DIP is the road map of program success and effective planning can help us to achieve 60 – 70% of the program performance,” said Dr. Mukund from the Sabal team. He was facilitating a session on effective utilization of the Detailed Implementation Plan (DIP) and Task Decomposition Format (TDF) facilitated by Dr. Mukund. He also shared that TDF will enable for breaking down the activities into a more manageable task and timely accomplishment of the task in the stipulated timeline” he further added.

“Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Cost Performance Index (CPI) are the two most important parameters that help in analysing the efficiency of the project,” Mr. Robin George, Sabal – Program Lead. He was taking a session on measuring the program performance using the earned value management techniques. He also shared his thoughts on the importance of a regular monitoring schedule and cost performance to assess the overall programme progress. He said SPI shows how you are progressing compared to the planned project schedule and CPI measures the value of work completed compared to the actual budget utilized.

A group reflection and planning was conducted for the macro and meso level initiatives by the partners of the Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra region. The key initiatives proposed for the next four-month included a district-level consultation meeting on tribal healers/priest identity, a CSO networking meeting, and a joint venture with an NGO partner to initiate ensuring food & nutrition security for the mother and children of migrant families.