Set up and facilitate WASH coordination meetings
Managing and facilitating Cluster meetings represent an important and time-consuming task for the WASH Coordination Platform. Meetings are just one decision making tools among others, and focus should be made on pre-meeting preparation and post-meeting follow-up. Meeting duration should be kept minimal (1h max), with clear agenda and action points follow up system. Apart from the first stage of an emergency, meetings should not be used as information sharing forum: information can be circulated before or after. Meetings might also be the scene of conflict among partners, that the WCC must prevent or deescalate. Templates to be used for meeting management are given in this tool kit, as well as tools for other related purposes (consensus building, influencing).
Meeting Attendance Templates
Keeping track of meeting attendance can help to populate initial contact lists, and are a means of tracking participation, particularly where key decisions have been taken.
Basic printable templates can be used to manually collect contacts and note attendances at meetings. It will be critical to ensure That these are circulated to all attendees during the meeting, and that these are collected after the meeting!
There are also a growing number of apps available to help maintain meeting attendances. Many of these are developed for team sports (maintaining information on player attendance at trainings) but are flexible and may be useful in some emergency situations. The most useful app identified is described in the Support Pack (AttendanceTracker).
Meeting Minutes Templates
Ensuring the documentation of decisions made during meetings, and their timeliness and ease of access, will help in ensuring transparency and accountability to Cluster members.
Basic templates can be used to track main meeting actions and their associated discussion points (rather than verbatim minutes), and identify those who agree to implement actions at the end of a meeting.
There are often too many people to remember names, ask/note what agency people are from and link the agencies to the actions. In addition, if it’s a very important meeting you can use your phone to record the meeting and double check actions afterwards.
There are also a number of apps available online to help maintain meeting actions. Most are not perfect but there will potentially be better versions developed in the coming years.