Turkey currently hosts over 3.6 million Syrian refugees and an estimated 400,000 from other countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Working alongside other UN Organisations, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) is doing all it can to support these refugees with language and skills training and relevant employment projects and programmes.
Philip Dearden (Head of CIDT) conducted two consecutive workshops for ILO staff in Ankara, Turkey to help improve the quality and results focus of ILO projects/programmes facilitate the enabling of lesson learning around these.
Welcoming participants, the workshop organiser Özge Berber Agtas (ILO Senior Programme Officer) said:
“It was good to do the two online training courses with CIDT but it’s great to finally have these face-to-face workshops. We have had a pandemic and have been waiting a long time – we very much welcome Phil back to ILO Ankara!”
The workshops covered Monitoring, Review, Evaluation and Lesson Learning (MRELL) and Results Based Management (RBM). The first workshop was attended by 18 ILO staff, all of whom had successfully completed CIDT’s MEL online course prior to the training.
The face-to-face workshop aimed to enable participants to appreciate the value of a Positive, Open Lesson Learning Organisational Culture (POLLOC) within their own institutional/organisational context and build appropriate M, R & E frameworks into Projects and Programmes and use them for adaptive management
Participants said: “The prerequisite online training course was very helpful to us all”, and “I also liked the engaging and participatory approach of the trainer during the face-to-face workshop”.
The second Results Based Management (RBM) workshop was attended by 12 ILO staff, providing a ‘refresher’ on key concepts of RBM and their practical application. It included a focus on the ‘Results Chain’; Reporting on Results/Performance (Results Based Language); Linkages between Projects, Programmes and the Sustainable Development Goals, Project and Programme Logical Frameworks and Theories of Change.
Participants especially valued the materials provided for the workshop, “Very helpful and detailed handbook that will be very useful in the future”; and the engaging and skills of the trainer: “The trainer moved us from theory to practice through the group work exercises”, “The group work was really helpful”, “The trainer was very successful in keeping levels of motivation”.
