Drawing on its wide experience that includes reproductive health (RH), community development, women's empowerment, BCC/IEC, and information technology, JOICFP conducted a four-week training course for prospective JICA experts, from 13th February to 10th March.

Both JOICFP and JICA believe that international cooperation development experts require more than just specialist technical skills, needing in addition talents such as project management, ability to build the capacity of counterparts, identify weaknesses in project implementation, and identify appropriate solutions. As well as this, they should be able to liaise and coordinate with international organizations, both on a local and global scale.

Joint workshop with the JICA RH project Vietnamese team;
discussing RH issues, root causes
and countermeasures in Vietnam and Japan

The training, which took place in Tokyo and in Nghe An Province, Vietnam, focused on six key areas: -

• Management capacity building
• Technical aspects of RH
• Knowledge of overseas cooperation activities
• Project survey and evaluation skills
• Communication and interpersonal skills
• Gathering and learning local and regional knowledge

The group was able to greatly benefit from in-depth analysis of the successful results of the JICA-JOICFP RH project in Vietnam through the independent final assessment by the Population Council of the United States.

In the field

For one week, Mayumi Katsube, former Project Leader, JICA RH Project, Nghe An Province, Vietnam, and Senior Program Officer, JOICFP, accompanied the trainees on a field trip to Nghe An to see first hand the realities of running a community-operated sustainable RH project in the field.

During first-hand observations
at Nghi Loc Ditrict Health Center, Nghe An Province

Observing a mother's class
at Dun Hieu Commune, Nghia Dan District

With scores of projects behind it, JOICFP is well able to deliver training and information on a wide range of potential difficulties and solutions for many kinds of projects at the grassroots. Communication with the project site is always at hand during the training, and in addition to observing the project site while in Vietnam, the prospective experts took part in a videoconference with Vietnamese counterparts who were receiving training in Japan, to discuss their respective experiences.

JICA-Net videoconference session
with Vietnamese counterparts in Japan

The training ended with the prospective experts making presentations at JICA headquarters to promote themselves as being sufficiently trained as reproductive health experts to be dispatched overseas by JICA.