Relevant Education and Training
a strategy for self-sustainability
More self-sustainability means having more autonomy and less reliance on external funding, expertise or decisions. It means having a larger capacity to choose and negotiate with other initiatives what’s best for your project and what’s not. It means an increasingly equitable participation, which will lead to development models that are more comprehensive and relevant for all, that is, more sustainable. Know more
Promoting relevant education and training is a strategy used by several development projects to become more self-sustainable.
Many initiatives benefit from external expertise or technical capacities. But when a project depends on them to survive, it is more difficult for it to maintain stewardship and to decide or negotiate with others how to adjust to the needs of its specific context. In contrast, when initiatives have local participants who are able to express their views, come up with solutions or solve problems, they not only make better use of external contributions, but also negotiate them on fairer terms, with more autonomy to adapt or create solutions that are locally relevant.
This is why several projects seek to create and strengthen their own knowledge resources by promoting that their different participants and beneficiaries receive education or training that is relevant to them and to the initiative, and that serves to increase their capacity to maintain local stewardship of their own development projects. Besides, expanding and diversifying sources of support through these knowledge resources helps several initiatives reduce their dependence on donors or funders, strengthening their capacity for long-term self-sustainability.
In this sense, many initiatives create or support education programs that seek to expand opportunities for children or adults to transform their reality, taking into account their specific context and different interests (such as intercultural education). Others train local stakeholder organizations or create incubators or entrepreneurship projects to train new leaders who can follow-up on their projects or provide alternatives to them. Still others work to raise awareness among local populations about the problems they address, making use of various communication resources (such as social networks, for instance) in order to create more favorable conditions for the solution of the issues they work with.
Actually, there are many different ways to make a project more self-sustainable by providing relevant education and training. Take a look at how these initiatives have done it!
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