SPARK Ignite: Yemen’s Interactive Training of Trainer’s Programme

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by Haitham Al-Dumini

SPARK held a 10-day Training of Trainers programme (TOT) at the SPARK office in Sana’a, Yemen from the 25th February through 5th March. The programme aims at developing the knowledge, skills and aptitudes of SPARK Yemen’s staff and local external trainers with six training modules (in Arabic) and instruct them how to effectively use the training modules to deliver to project beneficiaries.

Fourteen Yemini trainers were successfully trained by SPARK ‘s Master Trainer, M. Bassel Al-Hariri. They were involved in the learning process and showed professionalism and enthousiasm during the brain storming sessions, role playing sessions, buzz groups and individual case studies. The trainers were selected from three local partners (Yemen Education for Employment, Youth Leadership Development Foundation and For All Foundation). All the trainers have a background in entrepreneurship development training, which increased the level of knowledge transfer during their interaction with each other.

As part of the Agri-business Creation programme (ABC), SPARK Yemen through its team of Trainers shall provide systematic entrepreneurship development training to Yemeni beneficiaries to assist them in developing their business ideas into doable business plans utilizing the Yemeni Trainers who are already trained on SPARK Solutions.

The ABC programme will operate in Sana’a, Taiz, Ibb, Dhamar, Hudeidah, and Hadramout in the year 2014 on value chain development in Honey, Dates, and Strawberries. Following the careful selection of youth beneficiaries suited to receive business skills training, the youth will be given access to finance in order to start their businesses. The TOT is a first to local capacity building aims of SPARK in Yemen in order to contribute to fostering entrepreneurship and business development services in post conflict areas.

Haitham Al-Dumini is a programme intern in the Yemen office. 

SPARK IGNITE is SPARK’s blog of stories, updates and opinions by SPARK staff, on relevant topics in the news, stories from the fields, and what inspire us to do what we do.  We welcome external contributions; to contribute please contact media[at]spark-online.org.