| Grant Profile: |
| Project Title: |
Building Leadership Capacity for Economic Development (LED) |
| PCF/LICUS/SPF: |
PCF |
Status: |
Closed |
| File Number: |
258
| Region: |
EAP |
| Sector: |
Law and justice and public administration |
Country: |
East Timor |
| FY approved: |
2004 |
Grant Theme : |
Social dev/gender/inclusion |
| Keyword(s): |
Children and youth;Leadership training |
Approved Amount: |
$250,000.00 |
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Grant Recipient:
Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth, and Sports |
Grant Purpose:
The main objective of the project was to build trust or social capital among urban youth groups and youth-at-risk, to engage in policy dialogues with government and their community leaders. A secondary objective was to support young people through peer-to-peer non-formal training sessions— to strengthen self confidence and a sense of identity, and learn to value positive expressions of cooperation and teamwork. The purpose is to strengthen the relationship of youth with government and/or community leaders, anhd their parents, and build other positive social networks. The objectives were accomplished through two processes:
(1) Facilitating productive partnerships through a leadership, consensus building and collective decision-making program which fosters social capital and reconciliation between youth and other key stakeholders
(2) Empowering youth by expanding the assets and capabilities of young people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives, through a social skills development and communication program.
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Grant Activities:
Component 1: Assessment and Preparation
The purpose of this component was to assess and prepare the social capital retreats. It involved the following activities:
(1) In-country assessments, identification of “pressure points,” and materials design;
(2) Stakeholder inventory and “mapping” (i.e.: “who’s who”), to mitigate negative risks by identifying issues of trust and historical relationships;
(3) Developing Objective criteria for participant selection and participant selection;
(4) Identification of national trainers/facilitators and translators.
Component 2: Leadership for Economic Development Program
The purpose of the leadership for economic development component was to support vertical social capital for productive partnerships between youth and government officials, and other civil society stakeholders. The component involved homogenous and heterogeneous leadership retreats which promoted problem solving, built processes of collective decision-making, and supported social learning and progress.
Component 3: Youth Capacity Development Program
The purpose of the youth capacity development component was to give voice to youth, a highly vulnerable group in Timor-Leste facing extremely high unemployment rates and marginalization in the post-independence social, economic, and political environment.
(1) Enhancing institutional capacity for Youth NGOs in: project management, planning and development, supervision, monitoring and evaluation, and facilitation skills and communications;
(2) Enhancing individual capacity of youth at risk, through: youth NGO and Youth-at-risk networking program, business plan preparation for small enterprise development and linkage
to small grants for public service project, life-skills and career exploration sessions, conflict resolution and negotiations skills training, Youth-District Exchange activities, and communication development;
(3) Enhancing capacity of societal support networks for youth in youth social network development and family support and parent-skill sessions for youth at risk, all through the provision of advisory services, workshops, training and retreats.
Component 4: Monitoring and Evaluation Systems
The purpose of this component is to measure and track LED as a vehicle of social capital development among various stakeholders.
This component involved several activities:
(1) Developing pre and post workshops questionnaires for associated data-entry tracking of pre and post differential;
(2) Preparing workshop specific sub-questionnaires and sub-group validation questionnaires;
(3) Conducting data specific analysis and preparing workshop-specific monitoring reports;
(4) Preparing an overall monitoring report to design specific follow-on-questions.
Component 5: Community of Practice and Learning
(1) Developing a do documentary on youth aspiration and values, and producing videos of youth at retreats and the lessons they learned;
(2) Developing community radio programs airing interviews of youth during the retreats and material covered in the workshops for maximum outreach to youth groups throughout the country;
(3) Developing and launching of a website with various hands-on tools from retreat sessions, including written materials, case studies, manuals, and links to videos used, all through the provision of advisory services and workshops.
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Results:
• Youth councils have been revived in all 13th districts of the country to facilitate nation wide consultation/youth social assessment for designing the youth policy. A youth social mapping and youth institutional assessment were carried out to help identify youth concerns and issues. District visits were conducted to identify possibilities for designing youth programs involving youth at risk.
• Support was provided for the national youth policy formulation process. On September 29, 2006 a seminar was organized to present the policy and the detailed strategies draft to some of the national and international NGOs representatives in Fundação do Oriente.
• An interministerial meeting has been held to ensure youth concerns are covered, where relevant, within sectoral ministry policies. A youth survey was also conducted to better understand youth aspiration and the results have been disseminated among various stakeholders. Various youth workshops have been held to gather relevant information for the national policy formulation.
• Training on financial management, life skills, leadership training, entrepreneurship and organizational management skills for have been provided in Dili, Aileu and Manatuto.
• The Tabloid Lian Foinsa’e (The Voice of Young People) began publication in June 2006. It provided a range of information for young people and helps them to be aware of issues and progress in the youth sector in Timor-Leste, in the region and worldwide and is a way to respond to the needs of young people as identified in the National Youth Survey. It started as an 8 page publication and only 20 copies circulated and by December 26, the publication had increased to 16 pages of information with 3000 copies per edition. Unfortunately the newspaper publication was never “owned” by the Secretary of Youth and not included as part of the government budget. It has not continued after the LED project ended. In addition, no feedback was sought as to its usefulness.
• Following the crisis of May/June 2006, in an attempt to reduce the growing conflict among young people, the LED project under the direction of the Secretary State of Youth and Sport in partnership with the Youth National Council has been working together with other stakeholders (i.e. Plan International, UNICEF, Ministry of Labor and Solidarity) to support various youth initiatives aimed at bringing different groups together, including holding reconciliation ceremonies, and many other events for youth and children.
• Sustainability of results: The development of the youth policy was done in collaboration with other ministries, which lays the foundation for constructing an institutional framework through which concerns of youth can be heard and met. Also, the revived youth councils at the district levels work to ensure that youth will be heard and their problems are addressed.
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Lessons Learned:
• In a previous funded by the PCF, called the Capacity Building Assistance and Development project (CAD), monitoring by the Bank country team and consultants was extensive, and the country mission budget was used as an additional resource to ensure quality control. However, while monitoring was adequate, built-in evaluation mechanisms were less so. Because the grant was only $250,000, there was no automatic provision for an independent external evaluation. In retrospect, building an external evaluation into the CAD, however modest, would have generated valuable data on both lessons learned and design of future similar activities for Timor-Leste and other post-conflict countries. Since the results of the CAD have proven to be so compelling both in Timor-Leste and more broadly within the Bank, interest is high among other country and HQ teams to use the CAD as a basis for further work. While some information can be gleaned ex post, there is other information that would only have been generated if mechanisms were put in place at the outset of the CAD. Although participants’ assessments were solicited for every workshop event, a slightly more rigorous structure combining a baseline survey of expected workshop participants with a standardized format for pre- and post-event assessments would have generated more valuable data.
Key challenges:
• The crisis of summer 2006 revealed the importance of some of the issues that did not get attention in the past. Promoting institutional capacity of youth organizations continue to be a real need for the existing organizations. However, young people need to be equipped also with civic concept, attitudes and behavior to be active and effective citizens by performing their rights and duties. The modules that have been developed and some of the trainings conducted need revisions in order to be more relevant to needs and demands.
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