UNDP UNEP Leadership and Skills Training for PEI Champions

The Workshop, conceived by LEAD International in partnership with John Horberry from UNEP was attended by about 25 PEI champions and Senior Staff from Africa and Asia. Including Rwanda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan and Vietnam. The training session aimed to help PEI Champions become more effective at a) formulating compelling messages about poverty and environment b) widen the range of stakeholders that they engage with.

What was the aim of the project?

The stated objectives of the training were to enhance and develop participants’ capacity to engage and influence stakeholders to increase understanding of the role of environment in pro-poor growth and poverty reduction.

By working collaboratively with the group, LEAD aimed to:

• Create a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in working with finance and planning professionals in order to mainstream poverty and environment;
• Build on the knowledge and experience of participants and explore what kind of approaches, tools and behaviours will further inspire and engage different stakeholders;
• Identify what kind of approaches, messages and behaviours will be required to engage different stakeholders in a shared vision of mainstreaming poverty and environment;
• Provide opportunities to apply some tools and techniques to enable better conversations with different stakeholders;
• Strengthen the network of participants by encouraging and enabling future networking and peer to peer learning by means of on-line coaching and knowledge sharing forums.

Following the course, PEI champions will hopefully be more effective because they can create more compelling messages, are able to identify and engage stakeholders, and are able to close the gap between policy and doing.

Trainers agreed that the programme worked very well, in fact it could be turned into a generic ‘mainstreaming’ programme – not only about environment.