UNODC training on Needs Assessment and Programme Planning

20 - 24 March 2006, Dakar, Senegal

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We had been wanting to work in West and Central Africa for a long long time. That is why we joined forces with the Regional Office for West and Central Africa to organise a training workshop on Needs Assessment and Programme Planning for youth groups and community-based organisations of the region.

We had 23 participants in all from Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. How did we manage with the languages?!?!? Good question! Well, we had interpretation to and from English and French, of course. We had translated the training materials to be used during the sessions (see them in the new training materials page!). Above all, our participants made a great effort to understand and communicate with each other. It was great to see them succeed and especially seeing them decide to bring this commitment further and create the core of a network of organisations working on drugs and crime in the region. We wish them all the very best!

We also hope that all the activities that we undertook during the training will prove useful for their work at home. As usual, we discussed together what information is necessary to understand the substance abuse situation of a community or a target group. We then practiced some of the methods that can be used to collect this information, and we did this both together and in a community of Dakar. We visited the community served by the Centre Jacques Chirac, a centre that has been working to prevent drug abuse in Dakar for more than ten years! The participants also had the opportunity to talk to some other UN agencies, notably UNICEF and UNESCO, on their programmes for youth, especially with regard to HIV/AIDS.
Obviously, we did not only discuss how to understand the substance abuse problem of a community, but also what to do about it. What is an appropriate prevention response in different situation? What can be done to achieve a situation where risk factors are weak and protective factors are strong? Participants also practiced how to develop a project proposal, a skill that we feel will be useful both for fundraising and for planning clear activities with objectives that are precise and relevant and that are easy to monitor and evaluate … in short, recipes for success!

What else? We asked our participants to fill in an anonymous questionnaire to tell us what they thought about the workshop and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We are really looking forward to working together with our new friends in West and Central Africa. Keep in touch!

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last update 02 February 2007