Each day three or more participants are tasked with presenting a creative report back the next morning. A formal summary of the content is strictly ‘verboten’!
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| Workshop participants |
plain abstracts strictly forbidden
Over five days in Cape Town we were treated to live on-the-floor improvised stage plays of an international television newscast – including a presenter, panellists and a correspondent from another country. An old style schoolmaster conducting a comprehension test. An ensemble performance in which various participants read from an inspired dramatic text interspersed with traditional African idioms.
During the intensive theory presentations a few people would sing an African song to invigorate everyone. The rest clapping and swaying along. Eventually even the Dutch participants were motivated to sing a traditional song about how much they loved Amsterdam.
origins of creative reporting
The five-day Capacity Assessment Workshop held during April in Cape Town, South Africa, was a follow-up to a Capacity Enhancement Workshop held in Windhoek, Namibia, last year.
The tradition of creative report backs began in Windhoek. It was inspired by the African Community Publishing Development Trust in Zimbabwe, using creative participatory learning techniques developed in this organisation with the help of rural African communities, and Bush Radio, which prides itself on its creative programming.
course on request
The Cape Town workshop was an excellent example of co-operation between the North and the South. The introductory workshop in Namibia dealt with the guiding principles of capacity enhancement. Afterwards the African participants requested NiZA to provide a substantive course on the methodologies and techniques of assessing capacity within non-governmental service organisations.
Fons van der Velden of The Netherlands and Bangani Ngeleza of South Africa presented both of these courses. Their specific aim is to empower NGO’s to conduct self-assessments of their capacity enhancement needs.
medium-term programme funding
At the request of its southern African media partners, NiZA will soon begin to provide medium-term programme funding, and not only short-term project funding. The Cape Town workshop should therefore contribute to the efforts of the African partners in designing well-informed medium-term programmes.
participants
NiZA itself regarded the workshop as an important learning opportunity and has started applying this learning in its own internal operations. The Media programme sent most of its full-time members of staff and one of its SADC-based outreach consultants to attend the workshop. They were accompanied by senior executive staff representatives of twelve of the Media Programme’s forty partners. Some of these are experts in their own fields of capacity enhancement.
organisation analysis
The participants were taken through some heavy carbo-loading in the fields of identifying organisational characteristics; conducting scans on organisations, their performance, mission and vision; integrating values, strategy, organisational structure, programmes and relationships within an organisation.
excursions
There were also some excursions – one to view the famous colony of Simonstown penguins that have settled themselves happily among humans on a popular and environmentally protected beach. To the southern tip of the African continent where the warm Indian and cold Atlantic oceans meet dramatically. A romantic dinner at one of the beautiful wine farms of the Western Cape and to Robben Island – where Nelson Mandela and many heroes of South Africa’s liberation struggle were imprisoned.
After all of this environmental, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual wealth – just a reminder. NiZA must make a video of its next capacity enhancement and assessment workshop in Africa. Links
Report of Capacity Assessment Workshop - September 2002
Jeanette Minnie is an advisor to NiZA's Media Programme on the issue of freedom of expression. She has been a director of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) and the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI), South Africa.
