InWEnt International Capacity Building Programmes have more than Technical Aspects

Vitalis Ndume is assistance lecturer at the DIT Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology and an InWEnt it@ab consultant. He coordinates the Tanzanian internet information and learning platform at www.jifunzeonline.or.tz

When young professionals from south African developing countries take part in long term capacity building programmes for the Information Technologies (IT) abroad, usually the outcome is measured in terms of knowledge and technical skills. But there are also more human aspects that should not be neglected. During the twelve months IT training offered by InWEnt’s capacity building training programme known as it@ab - “Business related IT Consultancy”, the close contact to trainers and colleagues from the guest country helps a lot to establish personal relationships that further international networking even on a very personal basis.

The it@ab training programme has been designed by the German Capacity Building organization InWEnt on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The training program for young IT professionals from African countries offers an obligatory two months internship. During this time, participants learn and work together with national and international companies or organizations in Germany. In 2004, it@ab internships comprised very different contents and professional environments.

Voices form the Participants

Frans Nkoe from South Africa, who is doing practical studies at 21 LearnLine AG in Freiburg reports: “I am doing fine with 21 LearnLine. We install e-learning platforms for customers, customize the authoring tool for them, and meanwhile I know open source content management systems like Zope and Plone well.”
Two participants, Frackson Lubingu and Melinda Chulu, work at the German Telekom Training-Centre in Freiburg. They appreciate the relationship they have made with this international organization. “We work in PHP projects and we get good support; now we are experts in PHP programming”, says Frackson.
Three participants, who were working at different Police departments in and around Freiburg, focused on security issues in the IT. Nelson Chamba from Mozambique, Wilfred Warioba from Tanzania and Norberto Felix from Angola learned how to analyse disk under forensic aspects and studied data recovery and Debian configuration.
Patrick Chikumba, working at Tele-Academy of the University of Applied Sciences in Furtwangen, said “I have established a good business relationship with the staff. I plan to use this opportunity to implement my eTEM-platform and bring knowledge about e-learning to Malawi.”

“We have poor internet infrastructure but we can’t keep quiet. We need to do something to improve the situation”, said Frank Makoza, doing his internship at Europa Park near Freiburg. “During my internship I have learned a lot that will help me to push things forward in my home country.”
The author of these lines had the opportunity to work with Alternative Unternehmensberatung in the east German city of Ausleben and machm-it.org association which they initiated. Part of this internship was participation in e-learning workshops, interviewing e-learning users, and attending virtual classes, e.g. on C++.

Personal Relationships are an Important Part of the Programme

All the participants agreed that one very important aspect of their internships was that they have established and created very good relationships with many people, not only from Germany also from other parts of Europe. These relationships are believed to turn out fruitful in the future. “It is not enough for the African governments to claim relationships with European countries if we haven’t got any”, said Consuela Mwembeshi, a participant from Zambia doing her internship at the IT-department of the city hall in Freiburg.

International relationships become the stronger the more people themselves get involved, so that they can give, receive and share information. In this respect, the personal relationships built during programmes like it@ab form an important part of international cooperation beyond the governmental level.