Africans and Latin Americans Discuss Capacity Development

The writeshop, which took place from July 11th until July 13th at IICD's office, served as a reality check for IICD’s approach on capacity development. Its goals were also to capture the wealth of IICD’s 16-year experience on capacity development activities and methodologies, as well as document the major methodologies that involve train the trainer training, on-the-job training, collective skills trainings, technical updates seminars and tech fairs.

As Caroline Figuères, IICD's Managing Director stated: “Our methodology is to give a model that people can apply in their own context. That is the great added value of this writeshop and the fundament for the sustainability of our activities meaning that people will be able to apply them by themselves in their own context.” 
 

“A lot to look and hope for”

The participants of the writeshop were very enthusiastic to exchange their knowledge and experiences with their peers and to explore how they could redesign their capacity building approach in their projects.

Harry Hare, an experienced trainer from Kenya working for the African Development Resource Centre, a training research and capacity building organisation mentioned the importance of having a framework to identify training needs and having a training methodology and an evaluation. “The future of Information Communication Technologies in Kenya is bright and there is a general buzz about ICT used in economy, as well as many favorable policies”. In his work, ICT has helped him at every stage of training, management and organisation of events and evaluation processes with the use of Open Source ICT tools.

“There is a lot to look and hope for,” says Ken Kubuga from Ghana, who has a long experience as a trainer in capacity development as a trainer. For him, one of the most important aspects of the writeshop was identifying how to reach cheaper and more efficient communication in project implementation among the different counterparts. He underlined that “exposure to new technologies makes communication and documentation easier.”

The importance of exchanging knowledge

Mohammed Sangare from Mali, a doctor experienced in telemedicine research and teleradiology comments: “The general impression about the writeshop is that the different country experiences are shared and evaluated. That will eventually lead to a standardisation of these different uses.” Hugo Carrión from Ecuador, manager of Imaginar, a research centre for the Information Society, also refers to the importance of exchanging knowledge and experiences on capacity development. “I am learning very interesting things such as the process of capacity building, knowing experiences, exchanging knowledge, realising the things that need to be improved in capacity building.”

Many of the participating partners were also inspired by the experiences shared during the writeshop. Fabricio Fernandez from Bolivia says: “This writeshop has been dynamic, educational, giving an overview of the activities supported in other countries that are applied and are related to capacity building in ICT for Development." Yese Bwalya, founder of CareerMate a platform that provides career guidance for youth in Zambia, notes that “the prospects are really good. The instruction of the writeshop also allows people to engage in the discussion.”