• There is a group of at least 10 and at most 25 stakeholders, who are either champions of the OVC cause or whose support is vital to the success of your future initiative;
• You have a skilled facilitator who can lead the meeting;
• You have about $700-1,000 to fund the costs of the meeting, which will include the costs of renting a meeting space, serving lunch and two coffee breaks, paying a skilled facilitator for 3 days (includes one day for preparation, one day for facilitation, and one day for report preparation). The facilitator may be the same person you hire as your OVC consultant, assuming that s/he has the necessary linguistic skills (this, of course, greatly reduces the cost of the meeting).

• Consolidate data on relevant OVC categories;
• Analyze the factors that push children into these OVC categories
• Analyze the impact of being an OVC on the child and on society as a whole
• Identify ways in which the proposed project might affect the status of these OVC categories; and
• Propose and prioritize project design features that would minimize the negative impacts of the project on children and maximize the positive impact.
  

Stakeholder meetings can also be useful to government in the process of developing a comprehensive multi-sectoral strategy to prevent and address the needs of OVC. In this case, the objectives of the meeting would be to:

• Consolidate data on relevant OVC categories;
• Analyze the factors that push children into these OVC categories
• Analyze the impact of being an OVC on the child and on society as a whole
• Identify a comprehensive package of government policies and interventions to prevent more OVC and support those that exist
• Screen those policies against a number of criteria to ensure that the proposed package is feasible given available financing and capacity.

See the section entitled Developing OVC-Friendly Policies for a more detailed discussion of the policy-making process.

Details on specific exercises that can be used during the stakeholder meeting are provided in subsequent sections of this toolkit Analyzing the factors that cause a child to become an OVC; Identifying interventions that benefit OVC; and Selecting a Package of OVC-Friendly Interventions and Project Features.