This expert post comes from Lloyd Feinberg, Director of the USAID Displaced Children and Orphans Fund.
USAID's Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF) began as a relatively small ($1 million a year) U.S. Congressional earmark in 1989. In the years since, the Fund has supported a number of different programmatic directions, most of them focused on "categories" of children whose particular plight gained the attention of child protection practitioners, academics, humanitarian organizations, the media and/or political entities, within and outside the U.S.
Interventions have focused on street children, children in orphanages, children displaced from their families by armed conflict, children affected by HIV/AIDS, children with disabilities, etc. Strategies have focused on the development and trial of various types of "applied research" models, which could be replicated or expanded. Lessons learned about the appropriateness or lack of appropriateness of various methodologies, approaches, etc. have been gathered and disseminated, and various workshops, conferences and other venues for information sharing have been funded.
Almost from the beginning, however, DCOF has struggled to come to grips with a single, incontrovertible truth about successful child rearing: "It’s all about family." And, aside from survival in times of emergency, the single most critical challenge families generally face is the ability to develop and maintain assets and meet their financial obligations.
In recent years, we have been searching for and are now actively engaged in supporting a number of different approaches to strengthening the economic status of vulnerable families. The difference between most economic growth programs and DCOF’s, however, is that we have our "M&E eyes" fixed on the relationship between strengthened economic security and improvements (or lack there-of) in the health, educational performance and well-being of vulnerable children. The main activities that DCOF is funding in this area are the five country projects and the overall learning agenda of the STRIVE Program.
As these country programs develop over the coming three years and as lessons emerge from their experience, we look forward to exchanging information and views in future with you through this platform. Beyond that though, we are excited to be able to invite you to join us so that we can all improve our work and better support families in their quest to provide, healthier, more secure futures for their children. Through a combination of dialogue and practice, we can collectively improve the lives of many, many people around the world and I look forward to continuing to pursue that goal together.
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Skills Training: A New Paradigm
As a former Director of Training for Sylvan Learning Systems and Technical Training Manager for Honda America Manufacturing, I have noted some possibly critical flaws in skills training strategies in a number of otherwise laudable poverty reduction programs. This failure could seriously mitigate any positive benefit and indeed hamstring an otherwise exemplary concept.
In particular I refer to IFC’s Toolkit for training SME (small medium enterprise) in developing countries. The problem is both strategic and tactical. First the strategic issue: Training is NOT education. At first this may seem a paltry distinction, but it is critical because it confuses the objective of the training. Training is task and procedurally oriented, whereas Education is essentially concept driven and applications free. An “education,” approach to training needlessly extends the time, often frustrates the trainee, and defuses the results by introducing “memory competition,” causing the brain to lose focus on critical bits of information. One characteristic of a good training program is that it provides a necessary but minimal amount of concept, or theory, history of the subject, etc.
There are many other issues but given the limitations of this venue I shall be as brief as possible. Another desperately missing aspect of the “education” approach to training is the almost total lack of effective reference and support for the training on-the-job. This is called, “operationalizing,” or “proceduralizing,” the training. It provides a bridge between the learning and the doing … and it is often given short shrift in ost such programs.
Programs that employ this new paradim are called: Performance-based because they do not rely upon rote memorization but provide a profusion of memory tools and referential directions in the form of checklists, graphic procedure support guides, decision guides, and worksheet tools. There are tools for the mind as well as tools for the hand. Performance based training adheres to these five principles:
One: Teach the Concept (block diagram level only)
Two: Teach the Critical and frequent tasks (train to recall)
Three: Provide graphic reference tools (called “job aids,”)
Four: Provide for practice and/ or simulated practice
Five: Certify and release to the job
Performance based training reduces conventional training time be 60% or even more depending upon the degree of task extraneous information provided.
The “con” argument to this approach has been the “fish” story… Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach him how to fish and you have fed him for life. This implies that there are only two choices. This is not so. I pick the third option … do both.
What happens if, while we are teaching our hypothetical person to fish, (because of course we are using the education model… we teach the basic biology of fish and their various species around the world, the history of fishing, the various types of fishing employed around the world, and of course all this must be memorized and tested, then we have a number of site visits and lectures about various fishing strategies, none of which will actually be used by our fledgling fisher person) and while we’re doing all this education…the fisherman’s familly dies of starvation…
No, we must do both. give a fish and then train the person to fish. Train the worker first, then educate them. It will save, time, money, frustration and lives. To learn a bit more go to our site, http://microventuresupport.org/performance.html or, email me and I’ll provide more information: jpeloquin@microventuresupport.org