Jouwert van Geene

From 9 to 16 August together with my colleague Simone van Vugt I facilitated a training for 32 staff of the ICCO regional office in Kampala, Bukavu and Juba staff included. The training ‘Learning from experiences on the ICCO Programmatic Approach’ is part of a long-term partnership between CDI and ICCO to introduce and strengthen another way of working within the development cooperation.

Since 2008 ICCO is working with this approach in which ICCO promotes collaborative processes between their partners and other local stakeholders (government, private sector, research institutes etc) around development themes. Since then, CDI has been and is still involved in learning programmes for ICCO staff in their global office in Utrecht, strengthening the capacities of their main national facilitators, building the capacities of field office staff in the regional offices of Bali &  Malawi & synthesizing the experiences with the approach.

During the training in Kampala the participants were introduced to ICCO’s programmatic approach and the key concepts and tools that underpin the approach. This includes stakeholder and institutional analysis, working on Theories of Change, understanding and dealing with power and conflict and how this relates to the different roles ICCO can play in development where leadership plays a key role as well.

The participants used current ICCO programmes to analyse and reflect on the programmatic approach using the Multi Stakeholder framework and process model developed & adapted by CDI. The training also included visioning and developing new strategic directions for the regional office, since the office has only recently been established as part of ICCO’s decentralisation process. Participants were very appreciative of the training and made personal commitments to the implementation of the concepts in their work. The training will help them to establish strong coalitions of partners and stakeholders in the region to address issues like local market development in Ethiopia, peace building in RDC Congo, Conflict transformation in Uganda and inclusive education in Sudan.  

Here's a video about the training in Kampala. 

In June I also facilitated a similar training for ICCO in Bali. see this video for an impression.