Pentecostal movement relevant for development cooperation?

On January 27 ICCO/Kerk in Actie held a lunchmeeting with anthropologist André Droogers who's interests may be best described by the title of this book with essays in honour of him: 'Playful Religion'. Challenges for the Study of Religion'. More info on Droogers accomplishments as a scientist can be found in this Annual Report of 2006 published by the VU, the university Droogers was connected to. To ICCO's development workers Droogers pointed for indepth info to the Hollenweger Center and the research on Glopent a European research network on global pentecostalism.

Sietske Renting and Lisette van der Wel of ICCO/Kerk in Actie invited André Droogers to lecture about the relevance of Global Pentecostalism for the work of development organizations.

In the past 10-20 years a transformation has taken place in Christianity at global scale. Established churches with European roots, like the Roman-Catholic, Anglican and protestant churches are confronted with the departure of a substantial number of their members and see them join new christian churches and movements. In an era that the average church declines the Pentecostal movement seems to keep growing. Actually the poorer levels of populations seem to be attracted often to these faith based communities.

How and where do we meet as development workers this new reality in our work? And what does it mean for the policy of partnerships with faith-based organizations and church partners?

The anthropologist André Droogers, is a wellknown expert of Pentecostalism. In this lunch meeting he shared his knowledge about the background, the meaning and relevance of Pentecostal communities for the work of development cooperation. Droogers presentation led to a discussion about the challenges this development places upon the daily practice of our work.

When asked for a final word Droogers pointed to the enormous diversity in pentecostalism and adviced to try to distinguish the difference between them.

Gender Equality and Crisis

Margreet Mook, policy officer for gender issues at ICCO organized on Monday January 19 a lunchmeeting with professor Diane Elson of the University of Essex.

Diane Elson started her presentation on gender equality and the economic crisis and explained how this could lead to big changes in the economic system. Professor Elson explained the likely impact of the economic crisis on the economies in the South and in particular what this means for the jobs of working women.

In a discussion with the ICCO attendants Elson anticipated on the question what Development Organizations should do to deal with this crisis effectively.

Workshop: Working with Wiki's in Development Organizations - 13 February 2009

More and more development organizations are turning to wikis and other social tools to better communicate, document and share knowledge, collaborate, and exchange information.

Wiki’s are one of the most-used examples and are widely used in the ICCO Alliance ComPart initiative, as well as other development organisations.

On 13 Febrary 2009, ICCO and Euforic organised a workshop on 'Working with Wiki's in Development Organizations'.

This knowledge sharing session capitalized on the presence of David Weekly (founder and CEO of PBwiki) and other partners to share lessons and experiences, exploring how wiki’s are contributing to more effective development exchange.

Who's David Weekly?

I've been programming since I was about five, went to Stanford after coding for MIT and Harvard Physics, and am the founder of PBwiki. Our company has 30 employees and serves over 700,000 groups around the world - The Netherlands is our 12th most popular country for originating traffic, with about 30,000 uniques/month. My first trip to the Netherlands was in 1999 for the ACM International Programming Competition in Eindhoven; my girlfriend was our "team coach" and we snuck out to go clubbing in Amsterdam between events. A great deal of what motivates our team is the positive impact that we make in the lives of those that use our product: getting emails from Peace Corps workers in Namibia or seeing pictures of labs full of children in Costa Rica using our service really fire us up. I personally am very interested in this topic – I gave a talk in Geneva at the Palace of the United Nations in 2001 on community development technologies and attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia on the same. I flew to Ghana in 2004 to teach kids how to use computers. So of course we're very excited to be able to support development organizations with collaboration technology. I'd be delighted to hear what people are doing or hoping to do with their wikis and what other collaboration tools they're using in their organizations. Thanks so much for this opportunity!

Search4Dev: knowledge sharing among Dutch development professionals

On December 16th, in the historic library hall of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam, www.search4dev.nl was launched. The platform is the result of a government funded innitiative to provide an innovative searchengine to a repository for Dutch development organizations.

Search4Dev is an online library for the full text digital publications of Dutch development organizations. Search4Dev offers quick and easy access to these publications for those working in the Dutch development sector as well as for the rest of the world!

Search4Dev is an initiative of the Development Policy Review Network (DPRN), a network of development experts and policy makers who aim to reduce the gap between science, policy and development practice. The initiative is funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The online library has been realised by KIT Information & Library Services in collaboration with the the Digital Production Centre (DPC) of the University of Amsterdam.

ICCO: Interchurch Organization for Development Cooparation was one of the first development organizations to submit their digital publications for inclusion in Search4Dev. By participating in Search4Dev ICCO granted KIT Information & Library Services permission to include their digital publications in Search4Dev.

One of the entries is the option to search on the participating organizations. Searching on ICCO at the moment of the launch you would find 39 publications.

The role of diaspora in development

"It is important to empower the diaspora, because we are in contact with the grassroots¨ explains Mekka Abdelgabar at a public debate called 'women speak!'. A panel of six diaspora women from (former) war zones shared experiences on the female´s role in peacebuilding processes. Abigail Gonowolo from Liberia passionately described the exemplary role of women in Liberia in advancing towards peace: obstructing those who acted out of bad intent and placing sexual violence on the international agenda resulting in the adoption of resolution 1325. Mekka Abdelgabar described the peacebuilding trainings she gave in Darfur, referring to the Liberian example. Diaspora women spoke from their hearts during this meeting and the audience could feel it. It examplifies a possible role of diaspora in development, a topic that two recent meetings held in Brussels covered at length

The 8th Brussels Briefing took place on Thursday 11 December 2008 and focussed on the issue of migration and development. Two panels addressed the issues of migration and development, focussing specifically on the role of remittances and the involvement of diaspora communities in development policy and practice. In this regards, Cécile Riallant, migration and development advisor at the UNDP, explained the aim to promote the creation of a European diaspora platform. She also explained that a budget of €10-11 million was made available to support initiatives on migrantion and development. Alache Ode (AFFORD, VSO)focused her presentation on the Diaspora contribution to rural and business development, while Leila Rispens-Noel (Oxfam Novib) presented the work of her organisation in working with migrant diasporas. Last but not least, Ken Ndiaye, migrant and entrepreneur from Senegal, rounded up the session with a personal perspective on migrants’ life in Belgium.

Before this Brussels Briefing a Knowledge Fair on Migration and Development took also place in Brussels from 1 to 4 December 2008. The Fair aimed at contributing to the international dialogue on the benefits of migration for development and to create a 'Community of Practice'. This Knowledge Fair, which was initiated by the European Commission and the United Nations (UNDP), featured a 'Knowledge Marketplace' exhibiting various good practices of civil society organisations and governments on migration and development. During the Fair, civil society groups could network, find partners and share their experiences. Participants could also join several workshops and attend presentations on four main themes: remittances, migrant communities, migrant capacities and migrant rights. Atikha, a Philippine partner organisation of ICCO & Kerk in Actie was invited by the UNDP to exhibit its project: a trainers' training on financial literacy and peer counselling for Overseas Filipino Workers, seafarers and their families and the accompanying manual.

Different initiatives are thus taking place at all levels of society to involve diaspora in development practice and policy.

By Marja Rijerse and Stephanie Zwier

Getting ComPart to Angola

Lately we started the important step to expand the ComPart training sessions to our partners in the South. As you might have read in this blog, a couple of weeks ago two colleagues from Euforic were in Ouagadougo training participants of a Seminar on education; last week I was in São Paulo to introduce ComPart to the participants of a seminar on Land and water rights; and this week I was in Luanda to “train” staff of several partner organisations in Angola. It is really great we have now come to this stage because in the end ComPart is meant for communication and learning with and among partners, is it is very important that they know how to use the tools.

Certainly here in Angola it is clear that the (good) use of Internet communication tools can be very helpful. Transport is very expensive and difficult to organise and normal telephone quite costly. So the felt need for good and cheap means of communication is evident. Although very much in the Angolan way only after some reminders and at the last moment, 22 staff of about 14 partner organisations subscribed to the training. Nearly all of them attended all three days. Luckily enough, my colleague Arie Jongejan managed to hire a “ICT-lab” with 30 PC’s connected to Internet just one day before the training started., which is quite an achievement under these circumstances. So everything was prepared as well as possible.

The training itself went well, although it was not always easy. Far more than twice, in the middle of a presentation or explanation an energy cut forced an unwelcome pause. I really admired the patience of the participants and their ability to come back with their attention (although at some moments it was clear we all felt real frustration). As one of the most expressed needs was to have an alternative for the expensive telephone (mobiles) Skype was one of the tools I explained right after the general presentation. Perhaps that was a mistake, because all the time afterwards one could hear the well known sounds of skype calls, and thus the internet connection slowed down nearly all the time (I must admit also because one or two participants were downloading videos). In general the Internet connection was OK, but sometimes and especially the last day really very very slow. It took about 3 minutes to load a page and often resulting in the so well know notice that the page could not be loaded at all because of a time out. To say the least, that makes it difficult to explain and practice!

Most time was spent on the explanation and practice with wiki’s and blogs, but we also worked on Dgroups, Skype, Feeds, RSS, iGoogle and other tools. Participants were really enthused and regularly it was difficult to get them to have a break and even lunch. Several times they were also teasing each other by messing up each other’s pages or posts. So we also had fun ;-).

However by the way they were working and the questions they asked it also became clear that part of the participants had great difficulty to really understand what Internet is, e.g. understanding that saving a text on your own computer is something different than saving a wiki page or a post. So I had to spend quite some time on explaining the very basics. And I must admit sometimes I had quite a hard time because I felt I didn’t always manage to explain them in an understandable way. Fortunately also some participants helped each other (levels of understanding varied much), so for most, in the end, much became more or less clear. At least they said they learnt much and made some concrete plans to work with the tools within their work for the Education for All and the Hiv/Aids programmes and other activities.

As for future training activities for expanding ComPart to the South some main lessons learnt are:

• Training should really start at a very basic level;


• Whenever possible try to do separate trainings for “beginners” with ICT and the “advanced” users (e.g. it was impossible to explain the embedding of videos and presentations, even though it was an explicit question of a few participants);


• It is necessary to have enough time for personal attention (explanation) so their must be at least one trainer for at the most 12 (?) participants;


• Certainly at the start of the introduction of ComPart it would be better to have a couple of training sessions every one or two months than one longer one. Anyhow follow-up sessions should be planed from the beginning;


• It is important to involve local trainers because they know the wording used in the different countries (Brazilians and Angolans both speak Portuguese but some ICT terms are very different and cause confusion);


• Connectivity of course is also an issue. Although it is always needed to take low connectivity for users into account, whenever possible the training sessions should take place in a venue with as good as possible connection (interruptions make it really difficult to maintain attention and keep the training somewhat inspiring).
  
  Luanda airport, 6 December 2008
  Maarten Boers

I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate

I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate" is a blog that belongs to the members of the learning community "E-collaboration” members work in development organisations based in the Netherlands.

The purpose of this blog is to share stories about experiences with working over the internet. If you are interested to join the Dgroup, you can apply here.