On my way to A'dam & Mali

It's been a bit of a crazy month, spent doing some budget scenarios for different projects. For this year it looks like we'll be doing YETAM in Kenya (April) and Cameroon (July). I've been working with the countries on getting our reports from last year in as well as our forward planning for 2009. We have the project point persons selected now for Kenya and Cameroon. They are both really excited about the project. We'll continue to seek funds for Mozambique and Ghana.

My next big challenge will be to put together a training pack for the new countries. We weren't able to include a face-to-face meeting in the budget for the YETAM coordinators, so I'll plan to arrive in each country a little ahead of time to work with the staff and partners, and we'll do as much by email and skype as possible.

The past month I've been trying to get a feel for Twitter and how it could be useful to us. It seems to be a great tool for sharing ideas and learning, sharing links and initiatives. Hopefully I can keep it to a manageable level so that I can keep up with all the stuff being shared! The 'follow me on twitter' function on blogger is nice too.

So it's been a pretty cool and exciting month learning and tech wise. I'll meet with Plan's Innovations Manager in Amsterdam next week, and then all the regional communications people and some from headquarters will be in Bamako (Mali) for the meeting starting Tuesday. I'll get a chance to visit the YETAM Mali project on Sunday and another one on Monday before we start the meeting on Tuesday.... looking forward to this year. :-)