DevLearn Newsletter 4 – Training and Ideas
Dear all,
I hope you had a good holiday season, for those of you celebrating!
This newsletter has a slightly different format to the usual, as we want to let you know about our upcoming April training course and three project ideas that we are excited about and looking for partners on. The next newsletter will return to normal, providing tips and resources for market systems development.
April Training Courses: Market Systems Development and Results Measurement
We’ve just opened registration for our April online courses – click here for more information and to register for the training.
Our first course covers market systems development, introducing the core concepts and providing simple, practical tips to enable you to implement them. The second course covers results measurement, and shows you how to measure and use results when working in complex environments. Both courses are entertaining, interactive, and will provide real-life examples and advice that you can take away and use in your work. They will take approximately one day per week and can easily be combined alongside normal work.
Over a thousand people have taken our courses – including many on this mailing list – and we rely primarily on word of mouth to reach new participants. So if you’re interested, or know someone who is, please share the details with them. Subscribers to this newsletter can get a 10% discount with this code: DEVLEARN-2022.
DevLearn Ideas and Projects
We’re looking for partners on these three projects. We think they introduce some exciting new ideas and have the potential to significantly improve how we understand the lives of our target groups, create employment opportunities, and support economies in conflict. If any of the below ideas piques your interest, click the link to read the full concept note. If you would be interested in supporting the work or discussing further, please drop me an email.
Online Training: Market Systems for Humanitarian Practitioners. Approximately half of all trainees on our courses work in crisis-affected contexts. They have different requirements and challenges than trainees in more stable contexts, and we are aware that our paid-for model excludes many of the local humanitarian organisations, community members, and entrepreneurs who need it most. We would like to launch a new course designed for humanitarian practitioners, and scale it to reach a bigger audience.
Research: Remote Work Opportunities. The global market in remote, professional services will be worth $17.4 billion by 2023. This gigantic and growing market provides a fantastic opportunity to people living in poverty or insecurity. It allows them to transcend the geographic and economic barriers of living in a poor country, and to dramatically increase their income and skills. We would like to conduct a study to map out the opportunities and challenges, and design intervention briefs as a blueprint for implementation.
Online Training: Learn from the Experts. Typical training courses – our own included – miss out the voices of those receiving aid. They risk perpetuating a top-down approach to development, and give participants little insight into the realities of a life in poverty, or feedback on perceptions of humanitarian aid to date. We would like to launch a new training course to change this, where the targets of aid become the teachers. We envision a course where respondents from the Global South explain what it is like to live in poverty, the ways in which they access social services and earn a livelihood, and provide feedback on their experience of social support and humanitarian systems.
Interested? Click on the links to download the concept notes, and get in touch if you see any opportunities for partnerships or want to brainstorm ideas further.
Thanks a lot
Adam and the DevLearn Team