Solution Exchange network worked on forging partnerships and friendships by fundamentally connecting people with a common passion to represent a 'community of practice'. The community of practice could have people working in the NGO, donor or government sectors. This forms the premise of the MCH community of practice - people with the commitment for reducing maternal and child mortality. He shared that Solution Exchange worked to channel the vast repository of available development knowledge and passion

Solution Exchange was born in 2003 to meet the development objectives of India's National Plans and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The real challenge felt in this context was to develop effectiveness of the larger government programs and address issues related to implementation and effective delivery of service. In April 2004, the UN Country Team (UNCT) in India took this challenge to support the fraternity of development practitioners. The UN played a catalytic role in partnering with 18 UN agencies to initiate the 'Knowledge Management Partnership Project', as a key knowledge sharing and management initiative. UN leadership in such an initiative was effectual in lending a strong convening power, global experience and most importantly an impartial space/ platform sharing credibility with diverse stakeholders, viz., government, NGOs, academics and donor agencies.

Key resource persons at the conference included Dr Dileep Mavlankar, IIM Ahmedabad who made a presentation on Emergency Obstetrics Care (EmOC), Dr. Vinod Paul, AIIMS, Delhi whose presentation was on Operationalising Integrated Management of Neonatal and Childhood Illnesses (IMNCI) and Dr. V.K. Manchanda, MOHFW, GoI, Delhi who made a presentation on Skilled Care at Birth.

After the keynote presentations, break-out sessions for discussion among the participants on the three MCH burning issues commenced. The purpose of the break-out sessions was to engage the participants in three separate group-level deliberations, with each group specifically addressing one MCH burning issue/ keynote presentation. To bring community experience to bear on the issues as well as facilitate participants' ideas on the possible strategies to address the key knowledge gaps in the operationalisation of each of the issues, as part of key priority issues or focused initiatives of the Solution Exchange MCH community in the near future. The break-out session group deliberations were followed by participant presentations.

The workshop reflected the potential of communities working together and developing strategies to take the issues forward. Keeping in view the key objective of building solution exchange as a community knowledge resource, the future plans of MCH Community were laid out for the next one year.

Networking sessions helped to bring people together in smaller groups of 10 which deliberated on a specific thematic area in MCH to build consensus around one key question/ topic for future network discussion. Each of the 11 teams presented potential e-discussion questions to the larger forum.

In addition to the participant feedback in response to specific workshop sessions, open discussion on other observations by participants was facilitated to infer participants' understanding on taking Solution Exchange forward. An important part of the Visioning Workshop was for participants to provide their views on what they gained from being members of the MCH community, and how it could be improved. This information was elicited through participant feedback forms, shared with the participants at the beginning of the Workshop.