Charlotte's Web: Regional ICS Latin America Workshop, Nicaragua

This week I was facilitating a training workshop in Granada for country office staff based at the ICS agencies that have volunteers in Latin America. As well as staff from Bolivia (Tearfund and International Service) where I did my recent project visits, we were joined by Nicaragua (Progressio and Raleigh International), Honduras (Progressio) and El Salvador (Progressio). It was such a great opportunity to have direct contact with the people who actually implement the programme at a grassroots level. Usually in my role I have more contact with their colleagues in the UK so can often feel quite far removed from the real action!

Workshop participants (unfortunately minus Raleigh International and half of Glenda's head!)

The purpose of the week was to provide training in some of the more technical aspects of the programme, such as how to use the ICS database and the monitoring and evaluation framework. But equally it was a chance for agencies to network and share/learn from their different approaches, so the sessions were very participatory. Although ICS is based on some key quality principles (e.g. diversity; volunteer learning; strong supervision and support; community-based working and project impact, to name a few), the actual implementation models can vary from agency to agency so the workshop provided a useful opportunity to look at the challenges and strengths of these different models as well as create action plans for future programming.

As well as the sessions during the day it was great to get to know some of the country office staff in a more informal environment in the evenings. So as much as there was inter-agency sharing and learning, I also took a lot away from my conversations with individual participants over breakfast, lunch and dinnner as well as their contributions to sessions and country presentations where they shared one aspect of their programming in more detail.

Raleigh International presentation

On Thursday evening we decided to venture out of the hotel (four days of training can get a bit like cabin fever after a while) and visit an artisan market in nearby Masaya. Everyone was really looking forward to seeing/buying some of the beautiful local pottery but when we got there it was in pitch darkness. So with fifteen participants all set to buy souvenirs, we set out for another town only to find that closed too. Just when I was thinking we'd need to head back to the hotel so I could buy a round of consolatory cocktails, our driver managed to track down not just a market/shop but a whole pottery school where they gave us a full demonstration on how it is made before opening up the shop so everyone could buy souvenirs. Double win (and lots of happy workshop participants)!