Commissioned by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), this course brought together 15 participants from seven different Arabian Peninsula countries for a week of intensive training. Participants ranged from the director of a government research agency to junior research staff.
The course was designed to give the participants a thorough grounding in the basics of writing funding proposals, research articles and reports to donors. Like all our courses it mixed formal sessions, with a variety of exercises to stretch participants and keep the interested at all times.
Team-building was another major aim of the course - getting staff to find better ways of working together to produce the documents they needed. So in breakout sessions we asked participants to apply what they'd just learned to their own articles and reports. This ensured that the course produced a range of solid outputs. Participants also worked together to design a monthly newsletter to keep colleagues in different countries up-to-date with different project activities.
