climate and health

  • Making humanitarians

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    The industry to tackle growing humanitarian and development challenges has expanded rapidly since the mid 1990s, but not nearly as fast as the scope and scale of the problems have spiraled. Professionalization was therefore correctly identified as a major challenge of its own, with over a decade of research led by Catherine Russ and others clearing the rubble…

    Young man at a vocational education and training center, Marrakesh, Morocco. © Dana Smillie / World Bank
  • In the leafy month of June

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    June is good busy. Here are three highlights. Wednesday and Thursday 4-5 June 2014 I’ll be at the second Google Course Builder Faculty Workshop in Zurich. Google engineers built their own platform to host courses internally, but soon offered public-facing courses like “Power searching with Google”, and then open-sourced Google Course Builder. For an organization that…

    Summer leaves near Annecy Gorges de Fier
  • A question of such immense and worldwide importance

    Scale: Predictions over the impact of climate change and globalization suggest that we will see more frequent disasters in a greater number of countries, along with more civil unrest in those states less able to cope with this rapidly changing environment, all generating a greater demand for humanitarian and development assistance (cf. Walker, P., Russ, C.,…

    MAVEN Atlas V Launch
  • Sustainability

    In a complex, knowledge-driven society, learning, education and training are key to sustainability. Sustainability initiatives need to explicitly make learning strategic in order to succeed in the face of growing challenges. No organization, no sector can do so alone. Professionalization alone is not the answer. Education is failing to prepare humanity for disasters, climate change,…

    Lifebuoy soap for health
  • Know-where

    Six months after starting to develop LSi.io, I have 64 ongoing conversations with 150 interlocutors, connecting humanitarian and development learning leaders, Chief Learning Officers and academic researchers. Being independent has given me a unique vantage point from which to examine the humanitarian and development sector’s learning, education and training strategies. I believe that such perspective…

    Complexity & Networks
  • MOOCs for international and nongovernmental organizations

    International organizations already deliver training at a massive scale, but they do it mostly the old-fashioned way – one workshop at a time. The urgency of scaling up learning, education and training (LET) is real: with 320 million people affected by climate change-related disasters in 2015, 30 million deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and many…

    VUCA
  • Learning beyond training, to survive and grow

    Humanitarian organizations already organize and deliver training on a massive scale. For example, the Red Cross and Red Crescent train 17 million people each year to practice life-saving first aid, in addition to the training of its 13.6 million active volunteers. Training has been tacitly accepted as the primary mechanism to prepare volunteers and staff…

    Alligator trumps turtle
  • ASTD Learning Executive Briefing: Reda Sadki

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    This article was first published by the ASTD’s Learning Executive Briefing. By Ruth Palombo Weiss Reda Sadki is the Senior Officer for Learning Systems at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) Q: Why do you think the Red Cross Movement has a deeply rooted culture of face-to-face training for its 13.6…