The Public Affairs Foundation (PAF) recently organised an awareness programme on the importance of the role of stakeholders in making a policy effective. While participating in the course I realised why stakeholder engagement is important not only during the policymaking process, but also in the implementation and monitoring stages.

Briefly, stakeholder engagement includes identifying, analysing, planning, and implementing activities/policies systematically. To do this it is important to identify, engage with, and understand the requirements of stakeholders.

Ideally the tools and techniques include:

• Analysing data
• Representing data
• Communicating ideas

In addition to the above, it is important to map the stakeholders through different engagements events, such as face-to-face meetings, emails, phone calls, etc. Their response to the above also serves as an indication to measure stakeholder engagement.

Public policy stakeholder engagement is a process where information is gathered systematically and analysed to define the interests and involvement of various actors in a public policy or programme. Typically, stakeholder engagement is particularly important during these stages:

• Agenda setting: The government identifies the need for a policy
• Analysis: Information is gathered and analysed to determines the importance of and urgency for a new policy
• Formulation: Policies are designed/created based on the analysis
• Evaluation: The value of the policy is assessed
• Implementation: Where actual ‘action’ occurs

 Characteristics of stakeholder engagement

• Significance: Understand the objective clearly
• Iterative: Recognise interrelationships between the different stakeholders
• Collaborative: Understand everyone’s needs before translating them into a policy

Principles that guide stakeholder engagement

1. Encourage inclusiveness and representation
2. Encourage broad involvement and representation from diverse stakeholders
3. Understand and create a conducive environment to allow stakeholders to participate in all the stages
4. Develop relationships to include mutual learning and understanding
5. Establish clear and transparent information and feedback processes to acknowledge mistakes and misunderstandings
6. Share feedback constructively for accountability
7. Build strong collaborative relationships with stakeholders whose involvement is valued and respected

Conclusion

This event did a lot to convince me and other participants to ensure that stakeholder engagement becomes an essential aspect of all policymaking processes.