Dr. Salif Samake (L) greets Hon. Khadka Bahadur Basyal Sarki and Kabiraj Khana of Nepal Photo Credit Dominic Chavez

Dr. Salif Samake, director of the planning and statistics unit in Mali’s Ministry of Health, is part Nepali. At least that’s what he called himself at a recent MLI meeting, and only half in jest. Through an MLI program, Dr. Samake traveled to Kathmandu last year and attended a class with Nepali health officials to learn how to be a better negotiator.

Peer learning is one of MLI’s most important principles, if a difficult one to put into practice.   Working with five countries – Ethiopia, Mali, Nepal, Senegal, and Sierra Leone – MLI faces diverse challenges. All five countries are focused on different priorities, their health systems are distinctly structured, and they don’t share a common language.

But despite these obvious barriers, Dr. Samake as well as other MLI country-level participants have been able to learn from each other, and build trusting and sustainable relationships through repeated meetings.

One of those meetings came after Dr. Samake attended MLI’s roundtable held in Geneva during the May 2010 World Health Assembly with other ministry staff from the five MLI countries. There he learned that Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) was using MLI resources to improve negotiation skills among the ministry. He was invited and attended the following negotiations skills training in August 2010.

The training curriculum was designed to encourage active participation and sharing between attendees. Through the exercises, Dr. Samake and the Nepali attendants saw that their countries encounter similar issues when negotiating within the government and among donors. From their experiences, Nepal was learning from Mali and vice versa. The exchange was so positive that Dr. Samake was “adopted” as a fellow Nepali by the end of the workshop.

The relationship and trust between Nepal and Mali continued to strengthen through follow-up peer learning opportunities. Dr. Samake consulted the Nepali ministry officials when he was modifying the negotiation skills training curriculum to Mali’s context, which he taught to his colleagues at a Leadership, Teambuilding, and Negotiations training in June 2011. He reiterated the bond he felt with not only his Nepali counterparts, but other MLI member countries at the unveiling of the Call to Action for Country-Led Development at this year’s Global Health Council Conference.

Dr. Samake’s journey to Nepal was one of many opportunities given by MLI to senior health ministry officials. Other examples include Senegal and Mali visiting Rwanda to learn about health finance schemes; and all countries meeting in November 2010 for MLI’s Learning Collaborative Forum. The peer-to-peer learning also has had a nice benefit: relationships built among ministry officials from different countries will last for many years, fueling cooperative learning in the future.