☘️ Capacity Building ☘️
I just had an interesting discussion around #capacity_building and how effective trainings are/can be in the context of #Sudan.
Through the discussion I realised that I have observations and input accumulated over five years of delivering capacity building programs.
Therefore I decided to post a series about CBPs's best practices, challanges and I'll start by highlighting the hidden pitfalls from my own perspective within Sudan specific context, hopping they might be of use for some.
I'll cover in the first series #content #service_providers #beneficiaries #Plan #MEAL #Sustainability
Post #1
❇️Content
Two main areas to look for regarding content
🟢 Leveling/placement
🔹 In some programs, content is made across levels and uses a placement method to assess capacity & accurately place a beneficiary in a developing program where they get the upmost value, this usually happens in technical trainings. On the other side, some programs provide one set of content as bulk trainings without considering levelling.
Here is why that is unefficient:
If we stated levels as:
0=no experience
1=primary knowledge
2=developing learner
3=expert
4=demonstrates ownership
5=demonstrates leadership
We can realise that if we placed someone with primary knowledge at level 4 expecting them to elevate to level 5, they will most likely not to benefit from a CBP.
As well there is no point at placing someone from level 3 at level 0.
And that what some programs end up doing, because the content is either targeting the provision of basic knowledge or emphasise leadership through one content.
🔹 some content assumes the existence of basic skills due to the beneficiaries status, such as, communication, networking, critical thinking, technical knowledge,..etc
It is better to not make assumptions, instead make assessments to identify if there's a need for a pre training sessions to ensure beneficiaries ability to keep up
🟢 Contexualization
Training materials are often developed globally or regionaly, and yes, there are efforts for contexualization, but usually these efforts are made for sensitive topics, neglecting that:
🔹 sometimes there's a need to challange the communities mindset rather than being politically correct
🔹 sometimes similar problems with similar outcomes within different communities doesn't mean the social, economic, political and demographic factors are similar. Attempting to duplicate a successful content from one community in another without identifying the main dominators and understand how they correlate/interlink, the results will be different.
🔹best practices might not be best practices in every scenario, contexualization sometimes means making drastic changes rather than adjustments
🔹for some communities, content creation should be treated as a new process, allowing content development from scratch and then build up from there, rather than making tweaks on an existing content.
More posts upcoming..
