IPAT recently provided facilitation support to a Great Lakes regional planning
In late April early May 2014, an IPAT Senior Peacebuilding Adviser (Koenraad Van Brabant) facilitated a two-and-a-half day workshop for senior staff from four Dutch embassies in the Great Lakes region (Bujumbura, Kigali, Kinshasa and Kampala). This was the second internal workshop. The first had taken place in September 2013 and was facilitated by International Alert. The workshops are part of a pioneering process within the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop a regional strategy with regional programming that will contribute to ‘stability’. This raised the interesting questions of what makes a programme ‘regional’ and what contributes to the sustainable stability of a situation. The exercise provides however not only a new planning framework for the staff of the embassies, but is also a new way of working, which may necessitate some procedural adjustments.
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