Building policy planning skills to develop National and Territorial Action Plans in Colombia aligned with INSPIRE

Colombia’s National Alliance to End Violence Against Children and Adolescents and multisectoral partners are ready to launch the Colombia INSPIRE Coordination Course in March 2021. Co-delivered by the End Violence Partnership and Lab at the University of Edinburgh, the course pivots from three months of participatory planning and one week of intensive participatory learning to a virtual model has been an exciting learning journey.

Aligning with the INSPIRE Working Group’s new INSPIRE Competency Framework for learning, this online training brings national and international facilitators together to advance national understandings on how to use the INSPIRE framework and help localize the new National Action Plan to End Violence Against Children.

The outcomes of this 16-week learning exchange will include:

• Clearly communicate the importance of violence prevention;
• Enhanced Departmental Action Plans that reflect Colombia’s National Plan of Action; and
• Strengthening existing departmental level efforts to end violence against children.

Here, meet Mr Jaime Matutue, Senior Advisor at the Colombian Family Wellbeing Institute, the Government Agency responsible for guaranteeing the rights of children and adolescents in Colombia. Jaime also serves as our EV Partnership focal point and he coordinates the National Partnership to Fight Violence against Children and Adolescents. Jaime’s leadership has been exemplary; read here his impressive publication around the importance of multi-sectoral planning.

We interviewed Jaime about his role in delivering the INSPIRE Coordination Course and the expected impact of the course.

Jaime, please tell us about the course — and why the course is important at this stage in Colombia?

The INSPIRE Coordination Course that we are designing at this moment with the technical assistance of End Violence is very important for us within the strategy we are constructing in Colombia.

The National Partnership to Fight Violence against Children and Adolescents is an inter-sector strategy that seeks to guarantee an effective response to the problem of violence against children in the country and this course will be very important in terms of capacity building.

That strategy that I mentioned will have a National Plan, where one of the main components is local capacity building. And this particular course will be aimed at public servers, public officers, that, in the 32 departments of Colombia, will be leading the design of plans, 32 Department Plans to Fight Violence against Children

You established, with the End Violence Lab and other partners, a Local Organising Committee. Can you tell us what this is and describe your experience?

The Local Organising Committee (LOC) for the INSPIRE Coordination Course in Colombia was created to design, in a participatory and collective way, so that modules of the course could be adapted to the Colombian context and to the particular needs in terms of capacity building in the Colombian departments. This Committee is made up by government entities, like the Ministry of Education, the National Planning Department, the Presidential Council for Children and Adolescents and the Colombian Family Wellbeing Institute, and also by other organizations that are special partners in this process, like Universidad de Los Andes, the National Federation of Departments, and UNICEF.

It has been very interesting to work in this process within the framework of the Committee; it has been a work with a lot of lessons learned, and it has allowed us to advance in a co-creation process to design a course that is really adapted to the Colombian context, incorporating different perspectives.

Likewise, this co-creation exercise has allowed us to identify Colombian facilitators and references combined with international facilitators and references to offer a robust set of technical resources of interest for all the participants.

Is this a one-time course or will it be made available for others within Colombia and even Spanish-speaking Pathfinding Countries?

We are going to design virtual contents, also we will construct a repository of technical resources that will be available from the Colombian Family Wellbeing Institute’s virtual Learning Platform. And, after this first version of the INSPIRE Coordination Course that will be developed between March and May, this year 2021, these contents and these technical resources will remain available for all people working in different organizations, public and private, involved in prevention and response to end violence against children and adolescents all over the country.

Having these technical resources available on our ICBF website will allow us to follow up on the engagement in the course, the results, and also to continue offering the course permanently.

Thanks to USAID Heard and the EV Partnership, we’ve been able to accommodate the course to COVID conditions while still delivering quality global products. Stay tuned as the course brings nearly 77 technical planners together to learn, build and ensure that Colombia can prevent and respond to violence.