CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

RICE-WN is now blessed with a new term to replace the old term "staff capacity building." The chairman BOD RICE-WN took a one week session with the staff to go through a process known as Con-tinuous Professional Development in which the staff discussed four core topics namely Community Inception, Participatory Integrated community Development (PICD), Planning Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMEL) and Organization Assessment.

These topics had four objectives namely to understand the rational for participatory approaches and appreciate their relevance. Sec-ondly to improve community mobilization skills through attitude change tools. Thirdly to understand the fundamentals of M&E so as to enable the staff develop M&E plans. Lastly to discover high and lowlights of RICE-WN.

This is just one of the many capacity building sprees held occasion-ally for the purpose of professionalizing the staff of RICE-WN and the staff of friendly organizations in need. So far the results show progressive improvements in staff capacity. The only side effect (unplanned outcome) is that other organizations admire the high capacity staff and woo them away. This is still understood by RICE-WN as part of empowerment of communities. This is bound to regenerate into a new project typically for capacity building of new graduates.