Madagascar – Support to the FORMGED Programme

Context

ICRA’s involvement in Madagascar started in 1998, when collaboration was initiated with the National Centre for Research for Rural Development (“Centre National de la Recherche Appliquée au Développement Rural” or FOFIFA), and later with the National Centre for Environmental Research (“Centre National de Recherche sur l'Environnement” or CNRE). Under these partnerships, ICRA trained 12 Malagasy professionals.

In 2005, ICRA was awarded a 4-year technical assistance contract to support the FORMGED Programme ("Formation en appui de la Gestion des interventions de Développement"), financed by the European Union (EU). Under this contract ICRA gives technical support in training, gender mainstreaming and civil society organisation.

This contract has now come to an end and the Programme closed down in December 2008.

Objectives

The overall objective of FORMGED was to strengthen State and non-State actors to manage development processes. The programme was expected to contribute to greater control of development processes by beneficiaries and vulnerable groups, reduced gender inequality, and increased participation of civil society in the development efforts of the Madagascar – EU partnership.

Within this wider programme, ICRA helped enhance the capacity of individuals and institutions to innovate and improve rural livelihoods, promoting active learning methods within FORMGED and its partners, establishing inter-institutional teams, and helping them design better capacity building activities for their clients and beneficiaries.

Achievements

ICRA helped formulate a strategic plan for FORMGED at the end of 2005, developing partnership activities. ICRA’s achievements over the 4 year support period include:

The review and harmonisation of FORMGED training materials, with development of new material to create a resource "bank".
Support to strengthen civil society organisations (CSOs), through the establishment of regional platforms and capacity building of these.
Facilitation of programme planning and participation in the drafting of annual plans submitted by FORMGED to the EU delegation each year.
Providing support to the development and implementation of a monitoring and evaluation plan for the programme.
Establishment and support to an inter-institutional capacity strengthening team. Of this team of eleven members, four members have benefited from attending the ICRA Francophone programme, the other seven have benefited from a tailor-made in-country course in training design. This team is now actively implementing a national programme of capacity building activities.
In-country training in ARD for four regional teams. The teams have conducted action research on local capacity needs (2007), women’s access to land (2008) and local education planning (2008), completed by July 2008 in partnership with local NGOs. Out of the 2007 ARD experience, a CD Rom based interactive guide to capacity needs assessment has been produced and distributed, based on ICRA’s ARD methodology.
The building of a CD Rom based Learning Resources Bank on development intervention management that will provide Malagasy development professionals resources on a large variety of topics to build their own training programmes. This bank will thus complement FORMGED’s own training modules.
In November 2008, the organisation of a final seminar to reflect on experience and identify best practices in the field of training and development intervention management. The workshop was attended by 50 participants and resulted in lessons and concrete recommendations for the EU-Madagascar partnership (See the downloadable report, in French, in the right hand column).

Other project ideas are now being explored with some Malagasy development organisations to build on the experience of the FORMGED programme.

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Madagascar, Nov 2005, strategic planning w/shop

Partners

For more information on partners, see the: FORMGED Website

Centre National de la Recherche Appliquée au Développement Rural (FOFIFA).

Centre National de Recherche sur l'Environment” (CNRE)

Workshop reports

Rapport du Séminaire sur la Capitalisation, Novembre 2008 (pdf, 461K)