THEME

Capacity building

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Capacity building is often an integral part of our approach. In international projects this is often in the form of courses, training programs or on-the-job training. In the Netherlands we also contribute to ‘Post Academics Courses’.

HKV provides training in a number of ways :

Most often as an integral part of a project, where we train end users to build, use or maintain the tools developed within the project.
As a dedicated training project in itself, for example within the Framework of a NUFFIC Tailor Made Training project (Nuffic), where we train international water professionals at universities and governmental agencies in water management using state-of-the art tools such as Google Earth Engine.
Several of our experts contribute to courses in the framework of Post Academics Courses on technical knowledge and skills (via PAO Techniek & Management, PAO TM), which are in depth courses for experts with an academic background.

All of HKV’s capacity building is hands-on following the learning-by-doing principles. We incorporate a lot of time in our trainings for the participants to actually work on exercises that are useful in their daily work to make sure that what we train is used in practice. We monitor the participants progress and we receive feedback via online polling tools during and after the training. We support the participants in their learning process and are flexible in our approach and topics to cover to make sure that we provide the participants with the training that they need.

Due to current COVID-19 restrictions it was challenging to provide training in 2020 and still is now in 2021. However, we have been able to provide all trainings online. After providing several online trainings to participants from African and Asian countries and requesting regular feedback we have a good overview of what does and does not work when providing online trainings. We have set-up a lessons-learned document which all experts of HKV use when providing online trainings and is updated when new insights appear. For example, it is important not to make online sessions longer than 4 hours per day because it is harder to concentrate in an online setting. And next to online interactive sessions, also tutorials on video that can be watched at a later point in time are very useful, this provides more flexibility to the participants and enables everyone to keep up with the pace of the training.

If you are interested to learn more about our trainings and how we build capacity during COVID-19 please do not hesitate to contact us.