ISS Refresher courses 2016

ISS is delighted to announce that it has been awarded a grant by Nuffic Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP) to hold two Refresher Courses in Uganda and Colombia run by ISS Senior Lecturer Kristen Cheney and Associate Professor Dubravka Zarkov, respectively.

Uganda - Implementing Alternative Care in East Africa

Kristen Cheney will lead the first Refresher Course in Uganda, entitled ‘Implementing Alternative Care in East Africa: policy trends and best practices for children deprived of parental care.’

The Refresher Course will take place 1 - 12 August 2016 and will be implemented in partnership with Alternative Care Initiatives (ACI).

About the course

The number of children in institutional care in eastern Africa has increased by a factor of 15 in the last two decades. The proliferation of orphanages sometimes encourages unnecessary separation of children from families. This deprives children of their family environment with profoundly adverse effects on their development. To reverse this trend, regional governments are re-emphasizing alternative care, i.e. foster care, kinship care, and domestic adoption, to ensure that children without parental care have a safe family environment.

Course aims

1. This refresher course aims to provide the knowledge base and theoretical framework for understanding and developing best practices in alternative care.
2. It will further participants' original courses with practical guidance to develop the skills required to deliver services according to recently developed national Alternative Care Frameworks (ACFs) in the region.
3. The course will give participants a deeper understanding of ACFs and refresh their capacities in the region’s formal and informal national child protection structures.
4. Participants' newly acquired skills will therefore be in high demand.
5. Outputs include individual action plans and collective advocacy initiatives for implementing ACFs.

Colombia - Gendered Intersections: Conflict Transformation, Peace Settlements and Social Justice in Latin America

Dubravka Zarkov will run the second Refresher Course in Colombia, entitled ‘Gendered Intersections: Conflict Transformation, Peace Settlements and Social Justice in Latin America.’

The course will take place 26 September – 9 October 2016 in partnership with Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota).

About the course

Latin America has seen a number of violent conflicts in the last two centuries. Protagonists of the longest running one – in Colombia – are currently negotiating peace settlement.

• Will the peace be achieved, and if so what safeguards will there be for social, political, economic and gender justice?
• What will it mean for the socially marginalized communities, such as indigenous people and peasants dispossess of land through violence and encroachment of plantation and mining companies; for internally displaced people and urban poor; for families of disappeared and women and men who survived sexual and other forms of war violence?

Course aims

1. Participants in the Refresher Course will engage in addressing those questions using their existing and updated knowledge of the global, regional and national dynamics of conflicts, as well as their present and newly acquired analytical and interventions skills.
2. They will be aided in the process by refreshing old and gaining most recent theoretical insights into the fields of gender, economic and transitional justice; (post-)conflict transformation & peace settlements; human rights; and the links between them.
3. The course will support and enhance their analytical and practical work tools (gender and intersectional analysis, mapping) and methods (participatory/action research).
4. Outputs include action plans with firmly integrated gender perspectives and database for curricula development and research (among others).