A major global INGO had identified that relief operations in one of their regions consistently struggled with rapid-onset crises. Not only was that bad for the crisis-affected people, other aid agencies took the funding and operational space, leaving them a smaller player than their global profile warranted.
The agency had previously run global face-to-face training courses on humanitarian response management, and they had planned to run them for this region – but coronavirus related travel restrictions made this impossible.
I was brought in to examine the problem and move their existing course from in-person to online training.
In the analysis phase, I conducted many interviews with organizational stakeholders – especially with senior managers from the regional office and the country offices within it, to make sure that what we did aligned well with their priorities and strategic direction. Through the interviews I distilled the different stakeholder’s aspirations into a crisp goal for the project, around speeding up response.
I also ran a survey for potential learners, finding out about their experience with online learning (mainly positive) and their views on what caused the challenges with responses. For both the survey, and the interviews, learner skills were an important part (but still only a part) of the issue.
I summarized the findings from both interviews and survey on all the factors and presented them back to the client, together with a recommendation for a multi-week online course.
The course design was pretty much completely new. There were a number of themes shared with their in-person course, but the activities were very different.
The new course focused on learners completing actual preparedness tasks, with a small number of scenario tasks. Essentially all tasks were for activities that would speed up the response, which is why preparedness actions were so crucial. We also looked at operations/support procedures, and getting to know the colleagues they would work with – fluency with both of these speeds up work. Learners had many supports as they completed their tasks – video resources, webinars, Q&A forums and readings.
After the course, regional leadership identified that the course had created a change in attitude among the participants, with greater interest in response and readiness to move. In several rapid-onset crises since, the offices moved significantly faster. The learners themselves said that the course had been very practical, with 84% of them feeling ready to independently use the skills from the course in real-life.
