Update from the Choice team

It’s been a while since the last update from our CHOICE research team, yet it feels like only yesterday we went to visit CHOICE’s headquarters – that were then still situated in Utrecht – to discuss what our research was going to look like.

Time has passed by so quickly since then, we’re already teetering towards the deadline of our first draft version. It’s strange to think that just weeks ago we were conducting interviews with both CHOICE advocates, as well as employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Stop Aids Now, Dance4Life and the International Planned Parenthood Foundation. The interviews not only taught us a lot about the importance of CHOICE and how hard it is to capture advocacy in a quantitative way, it also made us realize how incredibly useful technology is.

Because aside from learning a lot about CHOICE and the realm of international advocacy, we can all say we have definitely brushed up our tech skills – ranging from the abovementioned Skype and recordings of interviews, to our use of Google Docs to work on our report simultaneously. Right now, we’ve delved into visualization and graphic design as we are hoping to create a visual image of our final results and recommendations.

And although the process has of course been subject to some technical hiccups – it is great to be able to see all our individual contributions come together in the final report. Because being innovative and creative are integral parts of our development of a PME framework, we have become frequent visitors of the Harmony Building to work and write together, rather than individually, which also involves loads of coffee, random conversations and sometimes home-made cookies!

Not only the cookies and daily dose of caffeine motivate us to keep going and give it our all, we’ve also had the pleasure of getting advice from Ms de Deugd on our progress as well as Mr Lamont, whose workshop on PME was very insightful when we were struggling with the development of indicators. We’re proud of what we’ve been able to achieve together, and will continue to finalize our analysis of CHOICE’s advocacy work on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. We can’t wait to present our final work to CHOICE and to share it with all of you!

On behalf of the CHOICE IRSP Research Group,
Saskia Postema

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