Three critical issues and lessons learnt

Autor: Leopold Reif, Hoffmann & Reif

• Training programmes provided in development cooperation programmes are in many cases not produced in a way that an ownership is achieved by the southern recipients. In other words, training often takes place as multiple singular events. There is in most cases no productisation process that results in training packages which can be re-used and adapted by the southern partners.The Northern training providers are usually not used to view their service as something that needs to be developed and managed like a product and that becomes replicable, adaptable and - most of all - transferable as a service to be further enhanced and deployed by the recipients themselves. Open Source applications today have become a serious requirement in the South. "Open Content" of training programmes as standardized, open, re-usable and adaptable content is still a relatively new concept.
• Education is viewed as an immaterial good that is delivered by an educator and through personal interaction. Its quality is only revealed in the process of delivery. Where as in distance education the productisation of courses is well known as a pre-condition for providing services efficiently, traditional universities are not familiar with this concept. The existing culture of producing and disseminating content at most universities should be seen as a major stumbling block for any dearly needed productisation process to be introduced, when education is delivered via networks.
• Many training programmes do not take the working environment of the participants - which is usually not in favour of the newly acquired skills - into consideration. This stumbling block cannot be tackled by including a "transfer component" into the training programme that intends to help the trainee to apply the new knowledge at the workplace. One will need to go a step further and include organisational development. It should in fact become a prioritised out-put indicator that in parallel to training an, appropriate organisational infrastructur is actually constructed in which the newly acquired qualification can become embedded.

It has been suggested that the "Ethiopia ICT - Assisted Development Programme" should address these three critical issues and lessons learnt through a number of specific programme features.