Invitation to Participate in a Civil Society Knowledge Café.
The West Africa Civil Society Institute has initiated a process of promoting peer learning among like-minded civil society actors and other stakeholders in the development space. This initiative dubbed the Civil Society Knowledge Café is aimed at connecting people, generating new ideas while enabling actors to find context-relevant solutions to pressing challenges plaguing the sector.
In this first edition that will take place on March 31 2021, the focus will be to explore issues pertaining to leadership transitions within civil society organisations. The virtual learning session will explore elements of leadership transition pertaining to the following:
- How this poses a challenge to organisational growth?
- How it manifests itself within organisations?
- Possible ways through which this perennial institutional menace can be addressed.
This process if in-depth critical thinking will be founded on empirical evidence gathered from selected civil society organisations in Ghana by Dr Solomon Amoah.
In a research conducted between 2018 – 2020, titled Interrogating Governance and Leadership Succession Planning in Selected Civil Society Organisations in Ghana (read the full research here https://bit.ly/3r9qgcK ), findings from the research led the author to conclude that governance practices within CSOs are ineffective and require an urgent response from stakeholders. The author argues that;
“… as it is now, governance practices in the nonprofit sector is generally nothing to write home about. So, the earlier founders, managers and the state become concerned and take steps that would improve the quality of governance in the non-profit space, the better.”
Hence, this session will afford participants an opportunity to critically examine the situation of their respective organisations and explore ways to address possible existential threats to effective leadership transitions within their organisations. The session will adopt a peer learning approach in view of ensuring that there is effective sharing of lessons among participants.
Below are the details of the Civil society Learning Café.
Theme: Defining feasible pathways to address governance and leadership challenges within CSOs
Discussant: Dr Solomon Amoah, Faculty of Sociology, University of Ghana
Date: Wednesday March 31
Time: 11am GMT
Venue: Virtual (Zoom)
Register here
We encourage participants to read the research report by Dr Solomon Amoah to effectively engage in the discussions.
Also, participants are encouraged to read some example of selected CSOs that have institutionalized successful leadership transition processes within their organisations. Read more here https://bit.ly/302TvBV.This publication by Christian Elongue and Katherine Adarkwa document success stories from OSIWA (Senegal), WANEP regional office (Ghana), NIPO (Liberia) and WACSI (Ghana). These examples are aimed at inspiring us. They provide information on concrete alternative approaches organisations can adopt to ensure that leadership succession planning is managed with ease to guarantee organisational sustainability.
We very much look forward to engaging with you in this maiden edition of the Civil Society Knowledge Café.
