To support our constituency’s efforts to reinforce their own capacity development, we help them enable finance officials as change agents who effectively share knowledge and discuss experience with colleagues within their own institutions, as well as with peers across South East Europe.

Over the years, we have gradually strengthened our skills to put learners at the center of our initiatives by applying participatory learning design. Adding to the active roles that participants are assigned at our events, we have been increasingly reaching out to them well in advance, for example, by asking them to prepare small interventions for the event. We have been also successfully involving several finance officials from the region as experts to do more detailed research on specific challenges. Gradually, we have been asking selected officials to make longer interventions during learning initiatives, for instance, by letting them facilitate a full session on their own for practice and reform experience.

Our ToT in 2015

Apart from enabling finance officials as trainers, we encourage them to design and deliver learning initiatives. Our Training-of-Trainers (ToT) approach plays an important role in this regard. As learning facilitators, we help them access the resources that they need in organizing such initiatives, provide operational support, advise them on the different learning solutions they might apply, and help them monitor and evaluate the outcomes of their efforts. By doing so, we give them a chance to introduce knowledge sharing cultures within their work environments, and to become successful communicators, motivators of reforms, and leaders of learning processes.

By now, we have established an extended community of change agents, who advocate learning by sharing practice and improve reform bottlenecks at high and medium management levels. They have also gained international and local recognition by being engaged as trainers/presenters within other capacity development initiatives, thus becoming unique contact points between various donor interventions. We prudently nurture our community by involving them in delivering our multi-beneficiary learning initiatives and reaching out to our constituency. As a regional knowledge hub, we provide change agents a platform to get recognition for their knowledge and access opportunities to further strengthen their capacities as knowledge brokers and learning facilitators.

Note: this post benefited from helpful comments of Tina, Ana, and Gašper.