Problem definition/
analysis and justification
UN-Habitat and some ministries and organizations in Iran,
including the Ministry of Health (MOH), Tehran Medical University, Urban
Renewal Organization (URO), Tehran Disaster Mitigation and Management
Organization (TDMMO), and Tehran Islamic City Council (TICC) have jointly
organized a series of training courses for professionals and decision makers in
Tehran in the last two years. Throughout 2015-2016 UN-Habitat and its partners aimed
to train at least 300 experts and decision makers on the issues of Urban
Resiliency, Disaster Risk Management and Sustainable Development.
While the results successfully were beyond the
targeted level and actually reached 446 persons in 2015-2016, a lesson learnt
was the realization that local institutions did not adequately address
prioritization of their training programmes and that there was need for highly
skilled professionals with multifaceted specialized expertise in all the fields
of urban development and disaster risk management and mitigation. With a view to
the on-the-job training features and patterns in Iran, UN-Habitat tried to identify
the weaknesses of the training and educational systems in the bureaucracy prior
to the design and implementation of the proposed courses, thereby covering the
gaps and weaknesses by utilising a combination of international educational and
training guidelines.
It is now intended to identify more organizations (public,
non-profit private) requiring training in order to expand the scope of the
training activities. UN-Habitat Iran’s
unique courses are held for the first time for Iranian organization and are
different from the training experiences that they had had before. Instructions,
manuals and material are mostly based on international practice, but UN-Habitat
puts a lot of efforts along with the lecturers to localize the context and make
it tailored to Iranian context.
Results of the capacity development progress show
that effective selection of the topics based on each organization’s needs and
considering their goals and strategies as well as proper training for the
expert participants would result in organizational capacity building in respect
to the employees’ terms of reference. Moreover, training method including
interaction, site visits and group exercises play an essential role in the
quality of the courses and raising enthusiasm of the participants. Further, specified
and exclusive courses for managers and the staff on the same topics separately
would facilitate the execution of the lessons among different tiers or levels
of an organization. The OTJ trainings are dynamic cycles in which new
experiences are gained in every course and realistic assessment of them would
enable the managers to define more efficient and effective training courses by
them and avoid wasting time and energy boost the advantages.
