VSO Tajikistan ICS pre-placement training

Arriving in Dushanbe at 11:30pm on Wednesday night has to be one of the calmest and stress-free arrivals at an airport I've ever done. I was met by Eraj, the VSO driver, and driven down the main street "Rudaki" to where I was staying. Rudaki is six lanes wide and lined with huge trees and buildings along a completely straight route.There were barely any other cars and nobody out on the streets. Absolutely not what I expected. And having just come from a short stopover in Dubai, where traffic jams are not unusual at 3am, it was a significant but very welcome contrast! Even though I knew that English isn't a commonly used language in Tajikistan, I wasn't quite prepared for just how much of a language barrier I'd be facing. Realising that it was late at night and I wasn't exactly sure where I was staying, I was keen to buy a bottle of water just to get me through the night. So Eraj and I entered into a charades-style conversation in which I acted out "water" in every possible way I could, potentially indicating that I wanted to do anything from go to a bar to go swimming. Looking completely bemused that I couldn't even speak Russian (a lasting legacy of the Soviet era) he then handed me a phrasebook. Flicking through I found how to ask for a facepack at the beauty salon, how to buy vegetables at a supermarket and how to introduce myself but couldn't find the one word I needed for the majority of our journey down Rudaki. Eventually I found it and then realised it didn't really help me because Tajik script is completely different. Aggggh. So with a lot of pointing at the phrasebook from me and a lot of "oh that's what you mean" noises from Eraj, we finally stopped and bought a bottle of "Ob". Ob. I'll never forget that word. Ever.



Tajikistan is the pink country bordering the north of the purple Aghanistan (India in orange)



Rudaki street in Dushanbe

So, as I said in my last post, one of the parts of my new role in the ICS Hub is to raise the quality of volunteer learning (formal training and experiential/reflective learning) throughout the ICS volunteer journey. So I'm here to observe the pre-placement training that the in-country volunteers attend before the UK volunteers arrive (having already observed the pre-departure training equivalent for UK volunteers last month). I'm also observing their in-country orientation (the training that all the volunteers have once the UK volunteers have arrived and they join together as one team before their placement). It's the first time the ICS Hub has had the opportunity to observe the in-country element of training so I'm looking forward to seeing exactly what happens and hoping I can use the visit to share learning across the ICS consortium. It's quite a different visit to the very "hands on" trips I used to make with Restless Development - it feels strange not to be facilitating the sessions myself, but it's great to see Sarah and Habib in action - the two Programme Supervisors for the programme who are leading the training.

I've now been here for three days and have just finished observing the pre-placement training for the in-country volunteers, a really diverse group of young people made up of Tajiks and Afghan refugees living in Tajikistan. The multi-national mix is a first for ICS and something I'm hoping to understanding better so we can consider the possibility of replicating the model in different regions to reach more young people in developing countries. They were a really enthusiastic group who threw themselves into ever aspect of the training, especially the role plays and case studies in which we definitely identified some budding actors! The two days covered a wide range of topics, including broad concepts such as culture, diversity and inclusion as well as more practical elements like the structure of the programme and an introduction to the project they'll be working on.

The UK volunteers arrive in the middle of the night tonight and head straight to the training venue for the in-country orientation in Varzob - which I now understand, from my one word of Tajik, must involve some "ob" so I'm hoping for rivers and lakes if not both!



Brainstorming ground rules for the training days



Latifai, Afghan refugee living in Tajikistan presents back the MDGs to the group

Habib and Sarah (Programme Supervisors) facilitating a session on volunteering

Role-playing a case study about Tajik food

Week 3 at VSO

It's been a very long, very dark, very cold winter. Not the most fun time to be between jobs but I'm told it's through times like this that we grow (and catch up on episodes of Mad Men)... But seriously, applying for jobs has been a full time job in itself. It's time consuming, isolating and, at times, utterly demoralising. I had a couple of very close calls, getting through to the third rounds for Save the Children and Sightsavers, getting pipped to the post at the final hurdle for both. But just after Easter I got an interview at VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) to join the ICS (International Citizen Service) Hub as a Programme Development Manager and am now in my third week (-:

Having worked on the ICS programme at Restless Development, I was already familiar with it from a delivery agency perspective. I think I probably mentioned before that Restless Development is one of eight delivery agencies that form a consortium for the UK government's international youth volunteering programme where young volunteers from the UK work in teams with in-country volunteers from developing countries on development projects that relate to health, livelihoods, environment, education and civic participation. Funded by the Department for International Development (DFID), it aims to combine projects that work towards reducing global poverty with volunteer learning & development and long term active citizenship. My new role is based at the VSO ICS Hub (VSO is the lead ICS agency that is ultimately accountable to DFID) which has an overview programme delivery and programme quality function across the consortium.

I work within a team of four Programme Development Managers, each of whom work closely with two delivery agencies as well as leading a programme quality project and sector(s). My two agencies are VSO itself and Lattitude (which recently rebranded from Gap Activity Projects). My programme quality project is to raise the quality of volunteer learning & development across the consortium, and I also lead on the education and civic participation sector-focused work. So there's lots of variety and lots of new challenges which I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into over the coming weeks and months. 

My first programme quality support visit will be to VSO's ICS programme in Tajikistan this June. For anyone who knows the Crowe family, the irony of this will be obvious. For anyone who doesn't, my eldest brother and his family have been living in Tajikistan for the last four years but just moved back to the UK last month! Although it's disappointing I won't be able to combine the trip with a visit to where they were living I'm nevertheless really looking forward to getting a better insight into VSO's programme there. It's a really interesting programme model, where as well as having UK volunteers working alongside Tajik volunteers, there are also some Afghan volunteers who will join the team for the three month programme. It's the only example of regional volunteer recruitment across the consortium (as far as I know) and an innovative way of including young people from Afghanistan who will then be supported to contribute to community development projects back home once their Tajik placement has finished. Anyway, more about that when I get back in July....

So it's only been a couple of weeks but here's ten random things I like about VSO already...

1. The bike ride to work that avoids central London (currently based in Putney, we're moving to Kingston in July when my commute will also include passing by the deer in Richmond Park).
2. Working in a team. My last few roles have been quite isolating at times so it's great to be able to bounce ideas around with the rest of the team, especially as the new kid on the block.
3. Running along the river at lunchtime with "The Flying Daves", set up by three VSO staff all called Dave. They don't seem to discriminate against non-Daves.
4. Proactive travel planning. So I'll have a better idea of where I'm going and when and can start to make social plans that don't involve cancelling at the last minute so I can hopefully be a better friend!
5. Playing my first netball game in TEN years and beating Teenage Cancer Trust in the inter-charity league in a close match that finished 11-10. Mrs McGinty would be proud.
6. Flexible working. As part of VSO's "Work Smarter" policy we're encouraged to work remotely as well as spending face to face time as a team. 
7. The bottomless pit of Fairtrade proper coffee in the kitchen.
8. The long term contract. Consultancies no more.
9. The 20% discount at the Nando's across the road. I kid you not.
10. The people. Couldn't ask for a friendlier or more welcoming bunch.

ICS Sierra Leone Staff Training Visit

Exactly a year ago today I flew out to Sierra Leone to begin the most nomadic year of my life (so far?) So it is strangely poetic that the final trip of my contract with Restless Development saw me returning there for an International Citizen Service (ICS) staff training support visit last week. It was so great to be back with the team in Freetown - lots of familiar faces and some new ones. The purpose of the visit was to train the new field officers and programme coordinator in all aspects of ICS from volunteer management to risk and incident management and monitoring and evaluation. They were such an enthusiastic group and we definitely identified some budding actors during the volunteer management role plays!

ICS Team, Restless Development Sierra Leone - Sinneh, Paul, Daniel and Jalloh 

Madelene, Jestina and Paul try out their volunteer management skills

Identifying qualities for effective volunteer management

Monitoring and Evaluation training session.

On my last day, the whole team sang to me and gave me a goodbye card. It took me back to my first visit to the Freetown office 12 months ago when I was greeted with drumming, singing and dancing. I couldn't have been made to feel more welcome during the three visits over the last year. Ah deh mis am!

With the whole team on my last day

As well as spending time in the office, it was great to reconnect with Freetown life outside work and make the most of the sunshine while the snow started to fall in the UK! So my week also included a sunset aerobics class in the hills outside Freetown, a trip to Malama Thomas street for material shopping (and dress-making by Mr Mansour), running at Lumley and Lakka beaches and Open Mic night at O'Casey's. Not sure I've progressed much with my ukulele playing but they're still an encouraging audience!

So it's goodbye to Restless Development for now. It's been an incredible eighteen months of working with some of the most passionate, enthusiastic and truly restless people I've ever met. I can only hope I'm fortunate enough to find such incredible colleagues in my next job.... 

Sunset aerobics

A trip to Freetown wouldn't be complete without a dress made by Mr Mansour!

Sunset football on Lumley beach

Lakka beach

Jamie and Danielle at Open Mic

First time amped up. Thanks Ned!

Jerusalem

After the workshops in the camp, I crossed the border into Jerusalem for the weekend. It's always somewhere I've wanted to visit - a fascinatingly complex city, stooped in historical and religious significance. Standing on the roof of the Austrian Hospice in the Old City, looking down on the Via Dolorosa, I could see the Al-Aqsa Mosque to my left, the Western Wall in the distance, and the Holy Church of the Sepulchre to my right. A truly unique and humbling experience, made only better by the best apple strudel I've ever had. Thank you Jackie!

Al-Aqsa Mosque to left

Looking down on Via Dolorosa 

Holy Church of the Sepulchre on the hill to the right

Western Wall

Jerash "Gaza" Camp, Jordan

This week I've been doing some volunteer work at a women’s centre in a Palestinian refugee camp just north of Amman, Jordan. The Jerash "Gaza" Refugee Camp predominantly serves Gazan refugees from the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Established in 1968, the camp is populated by 28,000+ Palestinian refugees. What distinguishes it  from the thirteen other Palestinian camps in Jordan is that, due to their 1967 status, 97% of camp residents are without a National ID number. This leaves them without access to the basic rights that Jordanians and 1948 Palestinian refugees are granted. The pictures below give a glimpse of some of the surface level challenges of living in the camp, but don't fully capture the depth of the issues that residents face. 

The Jerash Women’s Centre has recently been set up to offer women in the camp a dedicated space to learn English, discuss relevant issues (“majilas”) and even practice yoga. While the activities are popular, the centre itself lacks a coherent strategy, so I came in to run three days of strategy workshops with the women so that there is a clear plan going forward. 

Jerash Women's Centre

With the many issues women face in their day-to-day lives, it is difficult for them to step out of the present and think about the future that they want to have. So I started the first day by introducing the concept of "visioning" to a 5 year time frame. I think they thought I was mad when I got them cutting, sticking and colouring in collages to represent their individual visions for 2017, but they went with it and produced some very creative and insightful pictures that represented what they want for themselves and their families. After grasping the concept on an individual level, they worked as a group to map out their shared vision for women in the camp and for the women's centre in particular.

Individual visions

Basis of shared visions

On the second day, we identified some of the barriers/issues the women face in 2012 and grouped them under five themes: health, education, employment, family and law. We then decided which of these themes fell within the scope of the women's centre to address: health, education and employment. These themes formed the process of the problem tree analysis, a methodology that the women grasped really well and fed into with insight and intelligence. I was more than impressed. We rounded off the day by looking at how all the issues are linked and one can feed into another. For example, a poor diet can lead to illness which may prevent education and therefore limit employment opportunities. 

Problem prioritisation

Problem tree analysis for education related barriers

Identifying links between the problems

On the third and final day we worked on the "road map" that will link the issues/barriers women face in 2012 to the position they want to be in 2017. Very often in these kinds of processes, it's tempting to launch in straight away with the answers/activities before actually asking and analysing the questions. So by taking the time to do that, the women were really able to express WHAT they wanted the centre to achieve and HOW to achieve it, backed up with a solid understanding of WHY they wanted to do it. We started by rephrasing the problem statements into goals and converting the causes of the problems into objective statements. The women then split into three groups under the three themes and came up with some really innovative suggestions for possible activities that could be carried out at the centre in order to achieve the objectives. Ideas for health included bringing specialists from Amman to give interactive sessions on topics such as first aid and reproductive health. For employment, the women raised the need for entrepreneurship style training to help them convert some of the skills they have (needlework, beauty, hairdressing...) into a small business. And the education group raised their desire to learn more about the subjects that their children are studying at school so they can help them with homework. 

The next step is to take the nuts and bolts of the strategy produced with the women this week and turn it into a coherent strategy with a log frame for measuring progress, a clear budget broken down over the 5 years and an action plan with clear milestones for putting the strategy into practice. I'm hoping to follow up with some consultancy work in February to help this to happen. So look out for a follow up post in the not-too-distant future!

The process from bottom (problems) to middle (activities) to top (goals and vision)

With some of the women outside the women's centre, plus Nick and Jackie who work with the centre on an ongoing basis (on left) and Mahmud, the incredible 17 year old student who interpreted between me and the women (on my right)

ICS South Africa Programme Design Visit

I've just got back from my second trip to our South Africa office this year. In April, I was mapping opportunities to expand our advocacy and policy influence work. But this time I was there to support our team to design an ICS (International Citizen Service) programme to develop the skills of young people to access formal employment as well as develop their own businesses through entrepreneurship training.

Programme Design is an area of my job that I really enjoy but it's not always easy to explain what actually goes into designing a programme for international development, so I thought the last week in South Africa might be a kind of case study to explain a little more (and hopefully dispel any rumours that I'm just on a non-stop holiday!)

Most of the best programmes I've come across are based on a "needs assessment" - which pretty much does what it say on the tin. So in the case of our programme in South Africa, before I arrived our programmes team visited various communities in the Eastern Cape and spoke to groups of young people, as well as getting them to fill out questionnaires, to identify some of the challenges they face and what their most pressing needs are. The findings showed that in many cases, young people are unable to contribute to their household income as they have no means of earning a living - whether it be through employment or self-employment. 

These findings formed the next stage of the programme design process - problem analysis. This is a really simple process which involves writing the problem in the middle of a big flipchart (post-its optional but I'm trying to cut back on my addiction...) and then identifying the many possible causes of that problem as well as the consequences. So in the case of the problem of young people not contributing to their household income, some of the causes identified included high unemployment rate, lack of entrepreneurship skills training, a mismatch between the education system and the jobs market, policy barriers, family caring responsibilities, lack of access to grants and loans to start up businesses etc etc. Whereas consequences included a cycle of poverty, higher crime levels and other anti-social behaviour and even higher pregnancy rates. 

With the problem "tree" done, it's simply a case of turning it into a "solution tree" so that we're looking at the situation we want to have rather than the one we've got. Nothing like a bit of positive thinking! So eventually you end up with something a bit like this...

Once all the possible causes and consequences have been mapped, the next stage is to identify which of the causes we want to address through our ICS programme. As much fun as it would be to do this like a game of "pin the tail on the donkey", selection is a bit less random than that and usually involves some kind of criteria. The first part of this process is to consider the causes on a scale of influence. So, although significant, we determined that causes such as the high unemployment rate were simply so huge that we as an organisation could have little influence over them. The next stage is to look at the "fit" between Restless Development's goals and the causes. So in the case of the mismatch between the education system and employment market, we decided it didn't fall under our organisation's focus/remit as we do not work in formal education. Finally, we needed to consider the skill set of the young volunteers from the UK and South Africa who will be delivering the programme as well as the duration of each cycle of volunteers. So in the case of policy influence, although it's an area we do work on at Restless Development, we determined that young volunteers working on 3 month short term projects may not have the skills or time needed to actually influence policies. However, delivering peer education sessions in employment skills (CV writing, interview skills, how to fill out an application form) and entrepreneurship skills (how to write a business plan, financial management etc) is not only a good fit with our strengths as an organisation but suitable for cycles of young volunteers to build on one another resulting in a cumulative impact. We also recognised that our volunteers would be well placed to organise community events to raise the awareness of young people about employment opportunities and ways to access support when setting up a business.

Having identified the main focus of the programme, it was basically a case of fleshing it out by developing packages of activities that make up the programme - literally modelling the programme into something that is clear and structured. In the case of South Africa, this is shown in the flip chart on the left below.

Finally (on the right above, we mapped out what the programme would look like in practical terms such as where volunteers will be living (in host families in communities) and delivering activities (high schools and youth resource centres) as well as how we can staff the whole programme. My next job is to turn this into something that doesn't look like a scribbled mess but it's basically all there!

Putting the plan into practical terms

So. We have a plan. But it's just the start. And with the first cycle of volunteers arriving in South Africa in 4 months, there's still lots to do. During the rest of the week we mapped out a programme development timeline that means we have a plan for every week between now and then. But don't worry, I'm not that mean - blogs are no place for excel spreadsheets!

India ICS Programme Visits

My flight from Kathmandu to Delhi with Jet Airways was not the smoothest of journeys. During monsoon season I'd rather be on the ground getting soaked than in the air getting thrown around in the turbulence. But needs must. The journey's character was added to by the strange "beer only" approach to the refreshment trolley. I am not joking. Jet Airways - I salute you.

I spent Friday with our Senior Manager for Programme Quality, working through the implications of ICS monitoring and evaluation on our wider PQ systems. ICS is such a huge programme so where possible, we're trying to streamline processes with other internal processes, so it was really useful to dedicate a whole day to exploring ways to do that.

With Sushmita in the Delhi office

After a (far too short!) weekend with my friends Cecilia and Amit in Delhi, I jumped on a flight down to Chennai for three days of ICS programme visits to see first hand where ICS volunteers will be living and the kind of activities they'll be doing. Similarly to the pilot programme, in the scale-up they will be based in three different districts in the state of Tamil Nadu. Four volunteers from the UK will be matched to four volunteers from India and they will work together to conduct training sessions in health and livelihoods in new community youth resource centres as well as visiting surrounding communities to raise awareness around health and sanitation issues. I was really impressed by all the hard work that had gone into the preparations for my visits - as well as visiting the youth resource centres themselves, I was able to meet with key stakeholders and community members and talk to them about their expectations of the ICS programme.

 At the Thiruvallore Youth Resource Centre

Chengalpet Youth Resource Centre

 Meeting with the Youth Resource Centre officers

Community meeting outside Vellore with the Panchayat (village) chief's son

My last day in India was spent in the Chennai office with our South India team, doing a condensed version of the workshop in Nepal. The workshop feels like months ago now so it was good to refresh myself with the content too! As you'll see in the photo below, unlike our London office which is largely female, the Chennai office is made up of all men! They really looked after me and seemed determined to make me put on even more weight, feeding me delicious curries, dosai and idlies throughout the day! 

Lunchtime in the Chennai office