Building Capacity
Capacity building activities includes support for a variety of national and international training workshops to enhance participatory development practice in general and work linked to youth and adult learning and literacy in particular. As well as sharing best practices and innovations a number of specific workshops have been developed:
1) Reflect orientation
Many early Reflect training workshops did not result in the expected number of projects using the Reflect approach. Participants explained that even though they were keen and ready for such projects the managers and decision makers in their organisations had not shared their experience during the TOT and were hence more reticent. Since managers and decision makers can rarely spend 2 weeks at a workshop a shorter orientation of 1 or 2 days was devised and has been used to introduce Reflect to Education Ministers and their staff, NGO mangers and other key personnel. It does not equip them to go out and implement Reflect but it enables them to see its potential and understand its underlying principals and values.
2) Reflect Training of Trainers
TOTs take a mimimum of 12 days and up to 15 if participants have no experence of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) tools and techniques. This is the basic Reflect workshop that equips people to go out and continue learning about Reflect through using the approach.
Modules include:
- An introduction to PRA and its tools and techniques
- Analysis of participants' organisations and work
- The concepts of Paulo Freire
- Reflect and Gender
- Linking PRA and literacy
- Field work
- Developing a facilitators' guide
- How to write learning units
- Training for facilitators
- How to establish a project using Reflect
- Monitoring and evaluation
- The literate environment
- Action points and action planning
