Chapter Five: Lessons Learned
Lesson 61: Train your programme officers to understand social development, to be culturally sensitive, and to play their role not as traditional supervisors but as mentors and partners. A partnership implies a change in the way people relate to each other. Traditionally, the officers of funding bodies interact with local institutions as supervisors and comptrollers. When the relationship between the funders and implementing institutions is a partnership, the officers should work as mentors, advisors, and colleagues of the staff of the implementing agency, working together toward a common goal. This type of attitude, which is not the traditional one, needs to be encouraged. However, this is not only a managerial issue; it also has a sociocultural dimension. Ways to construct horizontal, partnership relations involve cultural diversity that must be recognised and accepted.
Implications of the lessons learned for different actors: Training institutions Lesson 62: Use the lessons learned to prepare people to implement new programmes. The lessons learned in other programme experiences should be systematised and used for training new personnel. They should also be shared with others interested in designing and implementing
similar programmes. The knowledge acquired by institutions through years of experience often remains in the memories of people, without being built into an institutional asset. Using the systematisation of experiences as a strategy for learning can meet two goals: (1) as a very dynamic and productive way of training new personal and (2) as a way of improving the process of systematising the lessons learned by the institution. Lesson 63: Interact with the people implementing projects; it is a great learning experience. New staff, senior officers, politicians, and planners can benefit from interacting with people from other programmes and projects and sharing their visions and experiences, their successes and their mistakes.
Implications of the lessons learned for different actors: Implementers and community leaders Lesson 64: Translate the findings of social development programmes into a language and style that can be used by implementers and community leaders. Quite often the results of social development programmes are shared with the funders but not with people who are in the field.
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