Workshops and Training 

What you will Learn  |  Relevance  |  Knowledge Transfer  |  Learning Spiral  |  Workshop Planning

If your organization is committed to democracy, to human development and to the rights of all people to well-being and a rewarding life, it probably also supports moves towards gender justice.  As a staff person, you are probably interested in including this perspective in your work.

But you may be uncertain where to start, or feel overwhelmed by the challenges.  Your assignment may be vague.  Your colleagues may not like the idea.  You may already have too much to do.  Equality between men and women may be a politically sensitive topic.  You may not be aware of research on women in your country, or how to network with women’s organizations.  You may need help deciding on the most important issues to include in your programme, and how to go about integrating them.

Our workshops help you to decide exactly what needs to be done, and how to do it.

What you will learn

Participants gain the skills they need to incorporate gender analysis into their work in meaningful ways that bring results.  Specifically they learn to use the following skills in their work for gender equality:

Relevance to your work

These workshops constantly make links between technical knowledge (in this case gender analysis, and gender mainstreaming as an approach) and individual learning, job competence and organizational learning.

The focus is on the use and application of learning, linked directly to the work waiting on our clients’ desks.  

Each workshop is carefully prepared to respond to our clients’ precise needs, with few “off the shelf” materials.

Each workshop uses the challenges that you identify as the platform for focused learning.

Transfer of new knowledge and learning back to the workplace

This is a central issue for the Capacity Development Group, often overlooked by workshop planners.  Too many workshops result in little lasting change in behavior because there is no plan to ensure the transfer of what has been learned into the workplace, nor a strategy to integrate it into regular procedures and current priorities. 

The Capacity Development Group seeks to address this in several ways.

The Learning Spiral

The diagram of the learning spiral shows the general format for our workshops, demonstrating the principle that for adults new learning takes place only on the basis of their own experience, building on what is already known.

The diagram also illustrates our personal commitment to supporting the transfer of new knowledge back to the workplace, where it is absorbed into office experience, and becomes the basis for renewed cycles of learning.

Workshop Planning

Effective capacity development requires competent organization. To ensure high standards of preparation and administration of meetings, members of CDG began to include event planning as part of their facilitation services during the late 1990s, and developed several useful workshop management tools and procedures.

In addition to facilitating your workshop’s substantive content, we can work with you to plan and organize every aspect of it, from inception to reporting. We do this by flexibly guiding and backstopping the planning and implementation process assigned to internal staff or partners. In this way the planning and implementation themselves become part of the capacity building that we offer.