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Sharing What We Know: Strengthening Implementer Capacity

Resource Type:
Documents

Facilitator: Christopher Szecsey, CORE Group Consultant

Successful development efforts can be accelerated through peer cross-sharing and learning. The session asked participants to draw on their own experiences as field implementers about building food security technical capacity, both within their own organization and with their partner organizations, so that they could share with others. This session was designed to first share lessons learned across organizations about food security technical and management and implementation capacity building; and then to work on as one organization, to plan further capacity strengthening of their organization and their partners. The session structure also left room for identifying, for future planning and networking, what further capacity building could be carried out within their own organization, with their own internal resources, and what might require possible external resources.

In identifying the support and resources they might need externally, both globally and regionally, to further strengthen food security programming capacity, participants repeated requests for

  • Increased networking
  • Support to development of resource materials
  • A one-stop website where resources and tools could be found,
  • Regional trainings where participants from multiple countries can come together.

These suggestions served as clear validation for TOPS current program strategy. However, participants also suggested additional capacity strengthening approaches including multiple requests for

  • Support to learning visits across countries
  • Opportunities for cross-training across multiple sectors, e.g., agriculture, water and sanitation, health and nutrition
  • Direct capacity strengthening in management and implementation areas:  logistics, finance, human resources, participatory methodologies, organizational development (including joint organizational planning, indicator development), general program management
  • Better dissemination of research findings and evaluations, including summaries in user-friendly forms of important reports and findings