Biggest online assignment

Back in 2017 I was invited by the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) to develop an advocacy training programme for use around the world. After we had piloted it in Nepal, it was launched in 2018 and has, so I understand, been used by Red Cross/ Red Crescent National Societies around the world to support their advocacy. The toolkit is available on online.

And then late last year, the IFRC approached me again, but this time they were looking for something different. This time they wanted me to develop a train the trainers course to help people to run the advocacy toolkit training – and they wanted it online.

I relished this challenge of thinking through what would be needed to help people to deliver this advocacy training. I began to think about the additional knowledge they would need over and above the existing toolkit, and about the approaches to training on the array of advocacy tools in the toolkit.

And then we looked to pilot this training of trainers course. I was asked to run 3 pilots in Africa/ Europe; Asia/ Pacific; and the Americas. Each pilot would run over 3 days with each day consisting of 4 hours of training. It was by far the biggest thing that I have ever tried to do online, but I was fortunate to have the excellent support from the IFRC learning team based in the Caribbean. And it seemed to work! Short presentations followed up by group work to apply the learning supplemented by good questions and discussions.

Of course it would have been so much better to have run this training face to face. But with no travel costs, we were able to train over 90 people from 5 continents in just 9 half days. We are now looking for them to use this training to take it out and to inspire other people in their countries to use these advocacy tools in their own work.