Training Workshop on Needs Assessment and Programme Planning for Central and Eastern Europe, 6-10 August 2001, Sigulda, Latvia

As some of you may recall, we had organised a training workshop on needs assessment and programme planning for drug abuse prevention in South Asia last year. From 6-10 August this year, we organised a similar training meeting for 22 youth from 11 countries of Central and Eastern Europe. This workshop was broadly based on the training module developed for the South Asia meeting by Dr. Harinder Sethi, from India and included extensive hands-on training, a field visit to a community in Riga and an eventual role-play presentation of project proposals. Signe Rotberga, the UNDCP's one-woman-show in the Baltic States, Giovanna Campello, a colleague here in Vienna, and I were the training team. Amongst other things, we covered various techniques of needs assessment like role-plays, interviews, focus group discussions, making effective presentations, preparing a budget and assigning roles and duties to members of your team. The emphasis was on the concept of learning by doing, rather than through lectures and presentations. The participants also undertook to conduct training in their own organisations and share their learning with other people.

The workshop itself was an interesting experience partly because of the language barriers. It was interesting to see that people managed to communicate in a mixture of 3-4 different languages and of course, in non-verbal ways. The group of young people (and some not so young youth workers!) were particularly lively and despite working for up to 10 hours a day, they managed to party a bit. As some of you know, whenever we organise events we always ask for feedback from the participants and the one valuable comment we continue to receive is that most of the meetings we organise tend to err too much on the side of work and don't leave enough time for relaxation and social interaction. Yes, we do load up the meetings with quite a bit of work and maybe we will cut it down a bit, but not too much. As youth, we still need to justify the trust that UNDCP is placing in us by providing us an opportunity to make ourselves heard. As a follow-up to this meeting, we have asked the participating groups to submit project proposals by utilising the new skills they have been given. These will be submitted to us by October and we shall then provide a small amount of funding for one or two proposals.