WBI social reporting apprenticeship programme on innovative procurement reforms

We're in South Africa this week for a new, exciting collaboration we have started with the World Bank Institute (WBI). It's about social media, ça va sans dire, but this time we'll be working with quite different types of development professionals and on a very specific topic.

Indeed, for the next four months we will be working with the WBI to facilitate an apprenticeship programme in Social Reporting on Innovative Procurement Reforms.

The rationale for this apprenticeship program is that innovative procurement reform initiatives are happening around the world, including in Fragile States. These efforts can offer powerful insights about what drives procurement reform. However, they are infrequently well documented and shared as practitioners don’t have tools or the support to document their work, leading to a missed opportunity to bring visibility to their work and share with peers.

The programme seeks to address this knowledge and capacity-building gap.

The WBI has identified innovative procurement champions committed to advancing public procurement reform, transparency and efficiency and we'll be kicking off the programme with a 3 days face-to-face workshop in South Africa. In the workshop, we'll train participants in the use of web 2.0  and social media  tools to capture and share their experiences.

One of the excellent features of this programme is that it goes well beyond the more usual social reporting training events. At the workshop, participants will agree the activity(ies) that they will explore and the colleague(s) with whom they will collaborate for the remaining months of the apprenticeship following the workshop.  It will be up to participants to identify and agree upon activities. These could include examples such as:

• documenting their own experiences of what works, 
• identifying  and documenting common good practices across countries or regions, 
• developing training materials which describe the stages of a process or 
• reporting on a deeper follow-through on the implementation of a specific activity.  

We'll support the apprentices with coaching throughout the duration of the programme, through online webinars, email discussions and virtual conferences.

All knowledge generated will be shared with a global community of practitioners for further learning and uptake - mainly through the Pro-Act platform.

In the video below, Marcela Rozo (WBI) introduces the Apprenticeship Program, its objectives and process.

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