Information about the 5th run

• Offering period: March 9 – May 15 (2020)
• Pariticpants: 51
• Countries: 17
• e-facilitators: Sarah Mshiu, Arthur Ngasani and Samuel Ochieng
• e-tutor: Valentina Barca
• Target group and selection process: The 5^th run of the e-TRANSFORM course was dedicated to members of African training institutions. These may include national or regional, as well as private or public institutes as well as Universities which run professional courses related to social protection and/or targeted to civil servants and practitioners engaged in the management of social protection programmes in African countries. 

[Applications are closed]

To apply, there was a need to complete the application form, accessible on socialprotection.org (note that you need to be logged into the platform to fill in the form – in case you are not a member yet, please register here).

Successful candidates were expected to be staff members of public or private African universities or training institutes focused on subjects related to social protection at the time of enrolment in e-TRANSFORM. In case the vacancies for this target audience are not completely filled, applicants from other institutions who have at least two years of experience in social protection might be considered. Selected candidates are expected to be contacted during the first week of February. 

The fifth run of the TRANSFORM online course was provisionally scheduled to start in March 2020. Click here to apply.

TRANSFORM

The “Leadership & Transformation Curriculum on Building and Managing Social Protection Floors in Africa” (TRANSFORM) was developed through a collaboration between African social protection experts and Africa-based experts of UN-agencies ILO, UNICEF and UNDP, and delivered in partnership with socialprotection.org. It was developed with support of the European Union Social Protection Systems Programme (EU-SPS), particularly the Government of Finland, and was further co-financed by Irish Aid.

African regional trainers who have the competences and the motivation to contribute to the further development of the TRANSFORM Social Protection Learning Package and its delivery in the region can be trained into Master Trainers and be involved in delivering capacity strengthening across the continent. It is envisaged that the trainers will form part of a TRANSFORM community, bringing delivery to countries in the region on national and regional level and at the same time be part of developing TRANSFORM further.

TRANSFORM was originally developed for face-to-face training and is currently being utilised and adapted for capacity building in several countries in Africa and beyond. An e-learning version of the TRANSFORM package is now also available. The objective of TRANSFORM is to build the critical thinking and capacities of policymakers and practitioners at national and decentralised levels to improve the design, governance and administration of social protection systems, besides bringing sustainable transformation in the governance and administration of social protection floors.

The e-course encompasses learning materials and methods for adult learning and adopts a facilitated and collaborative approach, using a combination of learning materials and asynchronous collaboration tools. It is designed to have a ten-week duration, encompassing the eight modules of the TRANSFORM curriculum, plus an Introduction and Final Module, requiring a five hour-week commitment from participants.

What you learned

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Have an overview and enough basic knowledge of Social Protection Floors and drivers of change and leadership requirements to engage in transformation towards national systems of social protection;
• Have an overview of the following main interconnected areas of Social Protection Frameworks: Selection & Identification, Legal, Administration, Monitoring & Evaluation, Management and Information Systems, Coordination, Governance, and Financing and Financial Information.
• Understand why and how a Social Protection Floor is beneficial to your specific county context and how it can assist social and economic development.
• Understand that a social protection system comprises different parts – all of which interact with and affect each other.
• Understand the need to adapt and tailor a social protection system to each specific country context. Every situation and time is so unique and requires constant adaptation based on practice and experience.
• Subject choices regarding the design of social protection systems to careful analysis of capacity considerations to address governance and administration gaps.
• Applying a rights-based approach as a lens by which to develop social protection systems and understand that these approaches go beyond a country’s legal framework, by actually putting citizens at the center of the development of managing and administering social protection systems.