A meeting of IFLA’s Regional Offices, kindly hosted by our Office for the Middle East and North Africa at Qatar National Libraries, offered an opportunity to explore in more depth how to work through partnerships to achieve our goals.

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Participants at the workshop for IFLA Regional Offices

Central to the second impact area in IFLA’s Strategy is the understanding that we can move further and faster towards our goals by engaging with other stakeholders.

This is in part about advocacy, and our work to shape the wider legal, policy and resource environment for libraries by ensuring support for libraries’ work and values.

But it is also about getting better at building partnerships – with other organisations, governments, funders and more – whose values and goals are aligned with ours, and who have complementary strengths to our own.

Working at all levels

In this context, IFLA has already been exploring both what the partnership landscape is for libraries, at both the global and regional levels. We have also explored what characterises those library fields which are successfully able to form partnerships at scale.

As we approach IFLA100, we are looking to use the opportunity that this presents in order to advance our goals here. The centenary is a chance to raise our profile and engage organisations in a different way.

Crucially, this is a shift that we want to see at all levels. In particular, there is strong potential for more partnership working at regional levels, with our regional structures – offices and division committees – contributing to success.

Regional Offices supporting culture change

In this context, IFLA organised a meeting of its Regional Offices from 7-9 December, kindly hosted by our Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africa at Qatar National Library (QNL).

Across two and a half days, we explored positive and negative experiences of partnerships in the past, and the lessons we can learn from them. We looked in particular at the importance of going beyond formal agreements, reflecting on the importance of ongoing communication and alignment of goals. We also reflected in particular on how to make initiatives sustainable by securing resources from elsewhere.

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Participants at the workshop, including in particular Huism Tan, Chief Executive of Qatar National Library (6th from right) and Sebastian de Groot van Embden (5th from right)

We were particularly honoured to be joined by Dr Mary Joy Pigozzi, Chief Education Officer at Education Above All and Sebastain de Groot van Embden, Strategic Growth Manager at the Qatar Foundation.

Alongside Huism Tan, Executive Director at QNL. They offered highly valuable insights about their own experiences, including the need to think hard about respective contributions, how to deal with difficult moments, and the value of being imaginative when looking at who to work with.

The lessons from the workshops will help guide IFLA’s work going forwards. In particular we will continue to work with our Regional Offices to spread insights and lessons around partnerships for the benefit of libraries everywhere.

We are grateful to Eiman Al Shamari, Director of IFLA’s MENA Regional Office, and the rest of the QNL team for their support. Similarly, we are grateful for the support of the Gates Foundation, via SIGL, for making this meeting possible.