In 2006 in Tunisia, we trained 20 project leaders and senior scientists from the Mashreq and Maghreb and Water Benchmark projects. These projects are doing incredibly important work to help very poor communities in some of the driest areas of the world.
To ensure that as many people as possible know about the great results and outputs being produced by these important projects, we taught the participants a wide variety of skills. These ranged from capturing expert interest and funding by writing better journal articles and clearer, more concise reports and proposals, to capturing public support through media such as newsletters and press releases.
The five-day course was huge fun, and at the end of it the participants had produced a range of concrete outputs, including:
4 PowerPoint presentations to explain different parts of the projects to
donors and non-specialists
2 newsletters - one for the M&M project and one for the Water Benchmark project
4 press releases - which participants will now send to newspapers to promote their work
2 abstracts for reports which the project is about to release
A report framework - which participants will use to standardize their reports in the future -
ensuring that they aren't too long and contain all the information donors need.
