This year I have the opportunity of teaching a part of the online course Food Security: Assessment and Action, part of the program on Food Systems, culture and society offered by FAO (the Food and Agriculture org of the UN) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
This course seeks to provide an understanding of food security, and create capacity on people working on food security projects in areas such as framework, information systems, reporting, assessments etc.
The part of the course I’m teaching is focused on Collaboration and Advocacy Techniques, a small part compared to the wealth of information that students are receiving on different frameworks and analysis.
I will try to cover three main issues:
1. Knowledge sharing tools and techniques in the context of a food security initiatives.
2. The challenges and advantages of choosing a collaborative approach to work on assessments and analysis.
3. Elements of advocacy: how to plan for it and how to design a basic strategy.
All contents of the course are incredibly interesting. Right now, students are discussing the issue of “What is Targeting & Why is Targeting important?”. A student explained targeting as “identifying the people, groups, families or communities most in need or most vulnerable, and designing the actions or delivery method so that it reaches (ideally) all of these people”.
Other topics include Monitoring and Evaluation and Food security policies.
I’m really impressed with the diversity of students and their backgrounds. Most of them are already working in Food Security initiatives all over the world. Instructors on this course are also incredibly saavy and experienced on all these topics. I’d link to their bios but they seem to have disappeared from the website. I’m learning the most by reading their comments and their posts on the virtual classroom.
You can check out the materials and the class references at the Distance Learning website maintained by FAO and the European Union.
