INF Partnership Conference

A three-day long first INF Part­ner­ship Con­fer­ence “Sahay­a­tra-Walking Together” was hosted by INF from 20–22 Novem­ber at Mul­ti­pur­pose Learn­ing Centre build­ing in Green Pasture Hos­pi­tal Complex, Pokhara Nepal. The con­fer­ence was inau­gu­rated by Krishna Adhikari, INF Nepal Exec­u­tive Direc­tor and led by Thomas Meier, Part­ner­ship Direc­tor along with his team. Around thirty del­e­gates from 25+ national and inter­na­tional INF part­ners par­tic­i­pated in the event. The con­fer­ence was designed to take the next crucial step in build­ing and strength­en­ing the part­ner­ship. The con­fer­ence sought to provide a plat­form for all INF part­ners to inter­act and explore oppor­tu­ni­ties for future part­ner­ship and collaborations.

The three-day con­fer­ence fea­tured three themes each day; Working Together, Trekking Together and Cel­e­brat­ing Together.  The theme working together focused on the real part­ner­ship, trekking together on con­flict man­age­ment and cel­e­brat­ing together on inter-cul­tural part­ner­ship.  The keynote Speaker for the con­fer­ence was Rev Dr Johannes Reimer, pro­fes­sor of Mis­sions Studies and Inter­cul­tural The­ol­ogy at Ewers­bach Uni­ver­sity of Applied Arts in Germany and the Uni­ver­sity of South Africa.  Rev Dr Johannes made his pre­sen­ta­tion and QA session around the core theme.

During the first two days of the con­fer­ence, rep­re­sen­ta­tive from each orga­ni­za­tion were given an oppor­tu­nity to present and give an overview of their work. This was aimed to support col­lab­o­ra­tion within and between the part­ners bring­ing them in closer coor­di­na­tion and under­stand­ing of each other’s work.

The con­fer­ence was also struc­tured to foster dis­cus­sion between par­tic­i­pants, and this was achieved by hosting small theme group dis­cus­sion on the topic Dis­abil­ity, Gender, Climate Change, Devel­op­ments in Devel­op­ment where each par­tic­i­pant could sign up to attend any two-group dis­cus­sion session.  The com­bined short pre­sen­ta­tions by spe­cial­ists, with struc­tured dis­cus­sion made the session more inter­ac­tive and fruit­ful. The out­comes of the dis­cus­sions were then shared by the facil­i­ta­tors of each group on the final day. INF also pre­sented the awards on the final day to the part­ners in recog­ni­tion of their sig­nif­i­cant and out­stand­ing support to INF in respond­ing to the dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake of 2015. These awards acknowl­edged the col­lab­o­ra­tion and part­ner­ship during the crit­i­cal time, bring­ing people together col­lab­o­ra­tively and imple­ment inno­v­a­tive solu­tions of respond­ing and rebuilding.

The con­fer­ence was well received by the INF national and inter­na­tional part­ners and INF Nepal staff members. This was achieved not only through con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, but also through the com­mit­ment and part­ner­ship over the years. The con­fer­ence in itself was first of its kind and INF Nepal is looking forward to organ­ise such con­fer­ence in near future to build the part­ner­ship and provide plat­form for collaboration.