Training Initiatives

The Bank also expanded its training activities with and for CSOs. These efforts ranged from technical skills training and policy analysis courses to institutional capacity-building workshops. While some of the training took place at the global and regional levels, the great majority occurred at the country level, often tied to efforts to improve the performance of Bank-financed projects. The training was quite diverse and included thematic areas such as gender equity, environmental conservation, and citizen participation in decision making, AIDS prevention, and labor policies.

Training undertaken over the past years

• Indigenous Rights: In Latin America, the WBI and Development Gateway partnered during fiscal 2003 with the Fondo Indigena to organize four workshops involving some 160 indigenous leaders from five Andean countries on such topics as intercultural public policies, project management, exercise of collective rights, and Information and Communications Technologies.
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• PRSP Participation: In December 2003, a 6-day capacity-building course on improving participation within the PRSPs was held in Zambia for 60 trade union leaders from Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, together with government officials and staff from the Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
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• Gender Equity: A workshop via videoconferencing on Gender Equality and Good Governance was held during the first semester of 2004 for government, CSO, and university leaders from four Central Asia countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
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• Social Inclusion: A distance learning one-day course on social inclusion was organized in January 2004 with some 25 community leaders, NGO trainers, and government officials from Malaysia and the Philippines.
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• Participatory Public Expenditure Management: The World Bank Institute’s Poverty Reduction Unit and the Bank's Social Development Department conducted several in-country workshops and distance learning courses to enhance capacities of CSOs, government officials, and other stakeholders in participatory public expenditure management and economic literacy in 2003.

The World Bank Institute’s Community Empowerment and Social Inclusion (CESI) program supports capacity building for civil society by promoting knowledge sharing among civil society practitioners, national and local government officials, media representatives, and other stakeholders. Learning methodologies include workshops, needs assessments, videoconferences, roundtables, exposure visits, and web-based learning. Together with other World Bank Institute programs and units across the World Bank, CESI undertook different initiatives in the past three years, including a global program on traditional structures and local governance; community empowerment networks in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; a program on civic participation in subnational budgeting in selected countries of Latin America and Anglophone Africa; and a program on expanding capacity to scale up community-driven development in Africa. Through these programs, CESI trained several hundred indigenous leaders from Latin America, women community leaders from Africa, and youth and community leaders from Eastern Europe in negotiation skills, participatory budget monitoring, and civic participation.

Finally, the Bank’s Civil Society Team carried out training on Bank–civil society engagement, both internally for Bank staff and externally for CSOs.  Twice annual Stakeholder Consultation training workshops have been held since 2000 for Bank staff, including task managers, sector leaders, and social analysts. The program included presentations on civil society and the conceptual underpinnings of participation, panels on Bank experience with participatory approaches, and interactive simulations on designing consultations. CSO representatives and academics were invited to serve as speakers and as participants in these workshops.  World Learning and PACT have partnered with the Bank to deliver these courses.  

The external sessions were focused on providing CSOs with a better understanding on how the Bank operates. Two training sessions on the World Bank governance structure, policies, and programs were provided to CSOs in Rome (Italy), and Bonn (Germany) during June 2004. These sessions were organized jointly with national civil society networks––NGO Italiane in Italy and Association of German Development Nongovernmental Organizations in Germany––and also involved collaboration with a French association of international development CSOs, Coordinacion Sud,. A similar session for United States-based CSOs was organized by InterAction and held in Washington, D.C., in October 2003.