Grassroots Globalism, by Degrees

Novel training program links activist groups on 3 continents

Since graduating in 1983 with an education degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Rosa Mendoza has had few opportunities for formal training in non-profit issues or management. Yet as a trainer and consultant working with small charities on issues of social and economic development, she has long wanted a more solid educational grounding in her field.

Within the past few years she was admitted to university programs in England and the Netherlands, but she received no scholarship assistance and thus was unable to attend. Those programs would have taken her away from her job for a year or more, and were heavily focused on academic research.

Last month, however, Ms. Mendoza was among six students who graduated from an innovative program that focuses on training mid-career non-profit workers and managers from across the Southern Hemisphere — her classmates hailed from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Namibia — to help make them better leaders. The program lets them integrate their studies with their jobs in a way intended to put the course within reach even of people who play key roles in small organizations.

As non-governmental organizations swell in number and influence across much of the developing world, they face growing pressure not only to serve more people but also to raise their own standards for effectiveness and accountability. Yet few developing countries offer formal education in such areas.

The Global Partnership for NGO Studies, Education and Training hopes to help fill that gap. The program, which has just completed its third academic year, has now graduated the second class in its master’s-degree program. The ceremony was held on the bucolic campus here of World Learning’s School of International Training, which hosts the American phase of the project.

“It’s a unique program designed around the special needs of N.G.O. leaders and managers in the global South,” says Jeff Unsicker, who is a dean at the School for International Training, as well as the program’s general secretary. “It’s the only one in the world that operates from the perspective of small N.G.O.’s.”

The program is a partnership between institutions on three continents: World Learning (formerly the Experiment in International Living), BRAC (formerly the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee), and the Organization of Rural Associations for Progress (or ORAP), in Zimbabwe.

Students pursuing an undergraduate diploma in grassroots development and non-profit management attend courses at Zenzele College, established by ORAP, while those seeking a postgraduate diploma do so at BRAC’s Centre for Development Management, outside Dhaka. Master’s-degree candidates attend additional courses at the BRAC center and spend a final semester at the School for International Training, here in Vermont.

“We’re looking at progressive alternative models of North-South partnerships,” says Jim Cramer, president of the School for International Training, which offers graduate degrees in teaching and international and intercultural management. The Global Partnership program not only helps build the capacity of grassroots-organization leaders in developing countries, he says, but it also exposes students and teachers from North America to different ways of meeting common challenges.

“It’s a noble but workable model for future partnerships we want to see,” Mr. Cramer says.

Practical applications are emphasized in course offerings in areas like non-profit management, research, training, intercultural communication, and policy advocacy. “Grassroots organizations increasingly need to be able to influence the policies of their governments or donor institutions and to hold them accountable by monitoring their policies,” says Mr. Unsicker. Organizations whose leaders fail to develop such critical skills, he says, may remain on the margins of influence and effectiveness.

The course has been an eye-opener for the students. Ms. Mendoza, for example, has visited two continents where she had never been before. “It’s a very good opportunity to see how we can have different cultures but use the same framework to do development work,” she says.

The program, developed after consultations with many non-profit leaders, is tailored to the needs of often-harried mid-career professionals. For example, the academic course work is divided into chunks of several months each. That schedule permits students to return to their jobs at intervals to apply the lessons they have been learning in class, to conduct field research — and to stay on top of any job-related crises that may be brewing.

Ms. Mendoza, for example, studied at BRAC from February to June of last year in the diploma course, then returned to Peru for three months of putting her studies into practice. She spent a further six weeks in Bangladesh, summarizing and evaluating the work for her diploma, before heading back to Lima, where she did four months of additional research for her master’s project, which dealt with how cultures differ among organizations in Peru.

And she spent the final four months of the program in Vermont, where she took additional courses and wrote up her research paper, before her graduation in June.

That schedule “is good for managers who can’t leave their organizations for a long period of time,” notes Sheepa Hafiza, who was one of 11 students who graduated last year. Ms. Hafiza is a senior trainer at BRAC specializing in issues of gender and development.

The program’s cost — less than $9,000 for the postgraduate diploma, exclusive of travel expenses, and less than $25,000 for the master’s degree — is well below that of many similar degree programs, although still out of reach of many potential candidates.

Ahsan ul Haque Helal, a project coordinator with CARE International in Bangladesh, notes that other academic programs in private American universities to which CARE has sent employees can cost more than $40,000.

Students typically depend upon scholarship aid and help from their employers to defray expenses. Ms. Mendoza, for instance, received aid from the Global Partnership program’s scholarship fund; she and her employer, the School for Development, in Lima, split the travel costs for her trips to Bangladesh.

Alternating periods of work and study also helps to integrate the two, Ms. Hafiza observes. “We studied theory and concepts and then went back to our own organizations for the practicum, which gave us an opportunity to relate things back to our work,” she says.

“Most master’s-degree programs are pretty academic,” adds Ms. Mendoza. “If I had wanted to focus on research, I wouldn’t have chosen this program. But it was good for me because it was very much related to my work experience.”

With at least five years of relevant work experience required for admission, students are not shy about suggesting ways to improve the program and make it more relevant to their needs. Management practices common in North America and Europe, for example, are seen as more bureaucratic and impersonal than those that prevail in other parts of the world.

Jeremia Muadinohamba, who chairs the Namibian NGO’s Forum, in Windhoek, has been studying indigenous management techniques in several parts of the world — practices that may involve story-telling, for example, or consensual decision making. He and some of his fellow students are recommending that some of those elements be incorporated into the program as well.

Such factors should also inform relations between grant makers and grant recipients, says Mr. Muadinohamba. “Development challenges are becoming so complex that we become bureaucratized and lose touch with the people on the ground,” he observes. “We want to see nurturing relations that go beyond projects. It’s about the human heart, the human touch.”

Ms. Mendoza, for her part, notes that organizations in the United States “need lots of paper” to define and document their relations with one another. By contrast, in Latin America, she says, “we develop trust in our relationships” that entails mutually binding, if unwritten, obligations. “If I’ve been working in a rural community for 10 years and [community members] identify a priority need for the next few years but I can’t give it to them, I lose their trust,” she says. Situations in which donors dictate the activities they want their grantees to undertake “go against the participatory relationships we’ve developed,” she adds.

Non-profit-management theory is overwhelmingly based on the experience of Western countries, especially the United States, notes Ms. Hafiza. But participants in the Global Partnership course are quick to reassess the theory in light of their own experiences. The cofounding institutions in Africa and Asia bring their own strengths to the program: BRAC alone, for example, employs about 24,000 full-time workers and some 33,000 part-time teachers and trainers, and trains both its own staff and employees of other charities at 10 centers throughout Bangladesh. The organization has been a pioneer in areas ranging from primary education to economic self-help programs.

Some Bangladeshis have raised questions about the wisdom of BRAC’s participating in the Global Partnership program, Ms. Hafiza says. “For an organization like BRAC, which has a deep commitment to grassroots people and its own staff, some ask why we are spending so much time on a course set to international standards, because it requires energy that otherwise people would put into the organization,” she says. “But BRAC says it is trying to develop the leadership of the whole N.G.O. arena, trying to do something for globalization from below.”

Mr. Helal, of CARE International, notes that “in the South, those in power are raising their voices and getting a large share of the globalization benefits.” He says that small grassroots groups in developing countries must combine their individual voices into a loud chorus that can compete with the voices of the powerful. To do so, he says, they need to see their efforts in a broader context.

“In Bangladesh, the N.G.O. community is huge,” having grown rapidly since the country achieved independence in 1971, says Mr. Helal. “But there is a lack of vision, of a long-term perspective that insures sustainability.” That kind of vision becomes clearer by participating in the Global Partnership program, he says.

Mr. Muadinohamba, of the Namibian NGO’s Forum, cites another potential benefit of the program. “There’s always been a trend of N.G.O.’s from the U.S. moving into the South,” he says. “But there should be an equal amount of people moving from the South to the North,” adding their perspectives on development issues to global discussions. In his case, he says, he was invited to present a paper at the spring forum of InterAction, a coalition of American non-profit groups that operate overseas.

The degree program has a very practical aspect, as well. “I’ve previously learned a lot in a more informal way,” Ms. Mendoza observes. “But one thing I needed was to have this graduate diploma, something written that can show I’ve studied it, that I’m an expert.”

As the demand for such expertise in non-profit leadership continues to grow around the world, the Global Partnership hopes to expand its own capacity as well.

Support for early stages of the program has come from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, among others. Plans are now afoot to include additional teaching centers, in Latin America and elsewhere. The school also hopes to develop an undergraduate program in non-profit management for Americans. Still another idea is to explore the possibilities of distance learning, using computer and telecommunications technology.

“I think of the program as a paradigm shift,” says Mr. Unsicker. “The Global Partnership will become the virtual college for N.G.O.’s working with the marginalized people of the world.”

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More information on the Global Partnership program is available from the SIT Admissions Office, Box 676, Brattleboro, Vt. 05302; (800) 451-4465; World-Wide Web: http://www.worldlearning.org/sit/gp/index.html.