NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
NORRAG NEWS ?the new implementation challenge
By Gerrit Holtland, Kenneth King and Robert Palmer, NORRAG
The aims and objectives of NORRAG have been stable over the years. The way of operating however changes every now and then. At the end of April you were informed that NORRAG can no longer be an independent association under Swiss law, but it will continue as a project under the aegis of IUED.With this move the formal requirements to have a board, annual general meetings etc. ceased to exits. This presented an opportunity to rethink once more the setup of NORRAG, and the main change we propose here is to work with country level teams of catalysts or animators. The principle reason is that we wants to ensure that the knowledge we collect is actually used by policy makers. And (knowledge- based) policies are, most of the time, made at country level.
The idea is that in each country with twenty or more members, two people take the lead. If possible a senior NORRAG member and a younger person. Their main responsibilities are:
1. to stimulate membership in the country. In the North emphasis should be placed on members that can stimulate membership from the South as well. Special attention should be paid to involving more decision makers
2. to own their section of the membership website; that is to review and update this
3. to organise country meeting with NORRAG members and policy makers; usually piggy-backed meetings
4. to provide annual updates of the main developments in education & aid policies in their country to NN.
5. to suggest themes for NN that are pertinent for the policy dialogue in their country; these themes should be linked to planned advocacy activities.
How the national level debates can be initiated and connected to NN is elaborated in more detail in the contribution of Gerrit Holtland. To assist country teams with a kick-off for their meetings, each volume of NN will be accompanied by a so called Policy Brief in which the main lines of thought in the NN will be summarised and where some statements are given that can be used as a starting point for a debate.
As mentioned in the e-mail of 29th April to all NORRAG members, these changes will not affect the nature of NORRAG nor of NN. The focus on the national level will not dilute the international orientation of NORRAG; it should actually reinforce it as the new set up will lead to more concrete contributions to NN. And traditional international activities, like those in Oxford and elsewhere, will continue like before.
Once again people are invited to respond to this; not only if you feel like joining or initiating a country level team but also to air your opinion.
Reflecting on the data on the membership per cluster of countries as presented in the Annex to the Membership, We think it will be useful to have informal coordinators in the following 8 clusters where individuals below have agreed in principle to act for NORRAG.
a. Switzerland: Michel Carton with selected colleague
b. Netherlands: Jos Walenkamp and Gerrit Holtland, NUFFIC
c. UK: Kenneth.King and Rob Palmer, CAS, Edinburgh
d. Germany: Wolfgang Gmelin with selected colleague/s
e. China: Emily Mang, CERC, HKU, and Jiang Kai, Peking University.
f. South Africa: Salim Akoojee, HSRC with selected colleague/s
g. Kenya: Barbara Trudell with selected colleague/s
h. Ghana: Rob Palmer till after Norrag Meeting in Ghana, late July 2006
In this way we have 8 sets of country coordinators which will cover a good initial chunk of the present membership. We could ask these coordinators to reflect on how they think they could increase the membership and how they think the members could make better use of NORRAG as a source for policy debates and ultimately for knowledge based policies. And we can expect NORRAG members to initiate activity in other countries.