Background of the Assessment Reports

The Solomon Islands Government-United Nations Development Programme (SIG-UNDP) Development Administration and Participatory Planning (SIDAPP) is a pioneering development activity in the Solomon Islands that is development-focused and people- centered. As its program title suggests, SIDAPP envisions to help people help themselves. At the time the rapid assessment was done, the program had been operating for two years and had gained significant appreciation, interest and enthusiasm among the participants in the areas covered thus far. The implementors judged that the time was ripe for expanding program services to other constituencies.
Hence, in the summer of 1999, the Singapore-based UN Office for Project Services for the Pacific Region requested the Resource Center for Local Governance (RCLG) of the Ateneo de Davao University to undertake an assessment of the three development training manuals formulated by the Solomon Islands Government in coordination with the UNDP. These manuals were drafted separately in the previous year and had been administered on a limited basis to provincial government officials, NGO workers, village chiefs, and selected representatives from women, youth, church and business sectors. The program implementors proposed to administer these training modules sequentially in the Solomon Islands provinces that were to be covered by the SIDAPP. These modules were:

(Manual 1) Orientation Seminar on SIDAPP for Provincial Government Officers and Development Partners

Manual 2) Constituency Profiling and Action Planning Workshop

(Manual 3) Workshop on Project Preparation and Appraisal
The unifying objective of these manuals was to prepare the target communities to undertake sustainable people-initiated development projects in keeping with the UNDP’s development paradigm.

Locale

The Solomon Islands is a young sovereignty in the Western Pacific,1000 miles northeast of Australia. Its nearest neighbors are Papua New Guinea to the west and Vanuatu to the southeast. Eight island groups make up the Solomon Islands. Honiara, its capital, is located in the biggest island of Guadalcanal, which lies roughly in the center of the archipelago.

The country is ruled by a constitutional monarchy with a unicameral parliament. A former British colony, the Solomon Islands gained full independence in 1978.

The assessment study was conducted in the provinces of Isabel and Malaita from 5 to 15 May 1999. The participants came from four constituencies, namely; Gao-Bugotu in Isabel Province and Central Kwara’ae, Renell and Bellona in Malaita Province.

Methodology

The consultants were tasked to subject the SIDAPP training modules to a rapid assessment procedure (RAP), a data gathering technique that involves supplementing data derived from observing the conduct of training with actual interviews from training participants coupled with an examination of the manuals employed in die actual training. RAP usually provides reasonably reliable field data given time constraints. It was essential for the program implementors (Solomon Islands Government and the UNDP) to evaluate the effectiveness of these training modules prior to administering the same in other constituencies.

A core group composed of 58 government personnel and constituency representatives was organized by the implementors after the orientation seminar to take part in the trainings that the consultants were to critique. The trainees were between the ages 27 and 45 years old. Most of them finished high school and went on to complete two-year vocational courses. Except for those employed in the government planning office, the rest had limited background in social development work. Only one was female.

The assessment touched on three aspects; participants’ learning, training module presentation, and workshop procedures. Interviews were conducted to assess change in knowledge, skills and attitudes of participants. The training modules were evaluated based on training content, instructional materials, training methods prescribed, and facilitating skills employed. The consultants also observed the actual conduct of workshops for data on training methodology and output.

The objectives of the assessment sought to

• identify the gaps in the program training process;
• determine the appropriateness of the training techniques used relative to the objectives set for both the training and the learning process;
• facilitate getting feedback from the participants and trainors on matters significant to the learning process;
• make appropriate recommendations to enhance the training design; and
• serve as evaluative data to guide program implementors in planning future delivery of services.

The consultants designed an evaluative tool using the Likert scale to rate the training programs along several relevant criteria. The mean rating of each module was based on the numeric average obtained.

Assessment Highlights

The consultants gave an excellent rating on the conduct of the Manual for the Orientation Seminar for Provincial Government Officers and Development Partners (Manual 1). The feedback from participants revealed that the delivery of training content was clear. From their reports, it was obvious that the training objectives were met insofar as providing the trainees with a working knowledge of what SIDAPP is all about, what the expected outputs would be, as well as how the individual participants fit into the program scheme.

While the flow of the topic was sequenced logically, the participants reported difficulty in understanding “difficult terms” like development, sustainable development, empowerment, and other technical concepts. The consultants also saw the need for more varied methodologies in keeping with the learning style of global learners. The Manual on Constituency Profiling and Action Planning (Manual 2) was judged to be the one most in need of some improvement. Profiling is considered as the first step prior to responsive planning and identification of appropriate project for social development. In this regard, the importance of data gathering, analysis and interpretation could not be discounted. It was the opinion of the consultants that the training design should have provided for input on enhancing interviewing skills, analysis and interpretation of data, procedures for constituency survey, technical report writing, leadership, and team building. The consultants also felt the need for facilitators to stress the participatory nature of genuine social development especially at the earliest stage of community profiling. As opposed to an environmental scanning model where data on a population’s needs can be read from information provided by outside agencies, community profiling requires that the people themselves provide data on their concerns. As such, the data gathering stage would be an ideal period to plant the seed of committed participation among the members of the community or organization. Inasmuch as Manual 2 was designed as a skills training seminar, delivery of the topic should have made room for more visualization and actual experience to stimulate learning and to enhance the cognitive and affective levels of understanding. Methods like role play and simulation could have been utilized to bridge handicaps arising from the participants’ level of educational attainment, age, life experiences, and socio-cultural background.

Lastly, the conduct of the three-day Workshop on Project Preparation and Assessment as contained in Manual 3 was relatively sufficient to impart basic skills on project appraisal, budget preparation and budget estimation. Among the three training modules assessed., it was only for Manual 3 that appropriate output was produced. However, only the government representatives were able to work on the identification of proposed projects. Ideally, constituency representatives or community residents should have participated in project identification and preparation if the principle of participatory planning is to be applied. Development initiators should create every opportunity to encourage community members to run the program so as to experience first hand the joys of their success, learn from their mistakes, and find new ways to work together. These in turn could redound to better relations and social cohesion among neighbors. For the development story to belong to the community, local participation is demanded as an acknowledgment of that fact.

Recommendations

Generally, the training content of the three modules may be considered sufficient to meet their respective training objectives.

The three training modules were designed to be administered using lectures in the beginning and open forum towards the end. Manuals 2 and 3, however, provided for workshops in between. While the lecture-open forum format is advisable when given very little time to impart training content, it loses out on providing an approximation or actual experience of the desired outcome on the trainee’s knowledge, skills, or attitudes. The consultants concur with the needs articulated by the participants for more actively participatory teaching methods like simulation, demonstration, role play, and problem discussion. Most of the recommendations made by the consultants referred to the conduct of the training sessions. These were reminders on rules of thumb for conducting more effective training. Among the recommendations made were:

1. Incorporation of expectation setting/checking in all three training designs to allow for adjustments in presentation and methodologies as appropriate to the profile of the participants;

2. Conduct of pretest and post test as a method for determining how well the trainees have learned;

3. Assignment of host teams to take care of incidental seminar tasks like prayer at the beginning and end of sessions, ice breakers, recap of previous sessions and learning insights, etc. This is advisable for trainings that go beyond two days. Having host teams not only lightens the facilitator’s load, it also helps foster better interaction, teamwork, more candid discussions, and a stronger sense of shared responsibility among its members;

4. Simplification of reference materials and handouts. Reading materials should ideally be presented in bullet format and couched in words that are easily understood by the trainees;

5. Evaluation of training at its culmination. An evaluation of training results is crucial in determining whether training objectives are met. This provides the necessary data to identify strengths and weaknesses of a particular activity and to justify changes as a way of responding to an articulated need to expand, modify or improve the module;

6. Processing of workshop output. Processing and synthesis of workshop output would help the learner and the trainer to evaluate the attainment of the learning episode’s instrumental and terminal objectives;

7. Documentation of training process. This would provide data for trouble-shooting gaps between content and training goals. It could also provide highlights on lecture inputs understand the conduct of previous to help training reviewers training also be used as reference materials for future sessions. This could re training and for terminal report purposes; and

8. Stress on the participatory nature of Community— needs assessment, project identification and project planning and implementation. this is the pivotal thrust of SIDAPP, it should be repeated  As i emphasized during the training.

Conclusion

The overall development program design was deemed to be sufficient to meet its noble objective of laying the groundwork for the success of holistic government initiative towards a better quality of life in the Solomon Islands communities, one that would enjoy highly committed participation among its beneficiaries. It is hoped that the program may be sustained and expanded to as many provinces that could be served.

In general, the three training manuals provided adequate knowledge of the program’s nature, operating principles and thrusts. Skills training content was judged appropriate to equip development partners with the necessary capabilities in constituency profiling and participatory planning to enable them to work hand in hand with the SIG-UNDP in bringing about genuine improvement in their communities. However, a little flexibility seems to be called for insofar as training methodologies and procedures are concerned to allow implementors to acquire more measurable learning results and to accommodate the adult learning style of its target recipients.