Government partners

The Science and Life Skills technical working group at work

From the organisational structure it’s clear that VVOB does not work in isolation. Particularly at the level of implementation, VVOB’s operations are firmly embedded in the existing structures of the government partners. We focus on providing support and facilitating the acquisition of knowledge, while execution is carried out by our partners. A lot of room is created hereby for institutional capacity building at both meso and macro level.

When we translate this more concretely into our two programmes of Teacher Training and Agricultural Extension, VVOB’s most important stakeholders are as follows:

• At strategic level this is the Teacher Training Department (TTD) of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS) for VVOB’s SEAL programme. For the ImAgE programme, it’s the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (MAFF).
• At operational level they are the Provincial and Regional Teacher Training Centres (TTCs) for SEAL, while for ImAgE they are the Provincial Departments of Agriculture (PDA) and the subordinate District Offices of Agriculture (DOA).

As laid out in the below figure, the complete organisational structure of VVOB’s two programmes (SEAL and ImAgE), consists of three levels:

• at management level, the Steering Committee provides strategic guidance. This includes approving strategies, monitoring risks, making policies, and so on;
• at coordination level, the Quality Assurance Committees and the Programme Coordination Units ensure guidance for operations. The Committees’ main responsibility is to assure and monitor the quality delivered at implementation level, while the Units are responsible for the daily management and operations of the programme’s components;
• at implementation level, the Technical Working Groups on the one hand and the Trainer of Trainer Teams on the other hand, ensure the execution of the programmes. The role of the Teams is to develop Trainer of Teacher manuals and training programmes to be used for the scaling up during the mainstreaming stage.