Malta: Maternal Health and Refugee Women session for Parliamentarians
A two-day field trip was planned to take place in Malta (March 2017), under the patronage of H.E. Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, President of Malta, organised by the Women Political Leaders (WPL) Parliamentarian Forum in partnership with MSD for Mothers. It brought together decision-makers from the national parliamentarian level and from the EU institutions (e.g., EU Commissioner for Health Vytenis Andriukaitis.)
Challenge: break down the barriers between different policy stakeholders, ensuring that they produce actionable outcomes and concrete results.
Solution:
Working in close collaboration with WPL and MSD for Mothers, Third-i was asked to mastermind a results-oriented participatory working session in Malta, and then a stakeholders follow-up at the European Parliament later in the year.
We developed a format bringing a range of stakeholder profiles from different countries together in an innovative, participatory way. The highly interactive discussion allowed participants to engage with each other on their perceptions of maternal health and how to bring policy solutions. It also helped overcome the language barrier between participants, with a number of cross-party national MPs participating actively through the help of a translator. The group developed solutions together and assigned priority to each recommendation.