Talent Development Project to launch next week in East Africa

We are thrilled to announce that the DEPP project Talent Development:  Building national and regional capacity in the humanitarian sector will launch in Kenya on November 7th.

The launch will be marked by an opening event in Kenya for a group of key stakeholders including Start Network members and other local and national humanitarian organisations. It will be followed by another launch event in Ethiopia on November 10th. Kenya and Ethiopia are key focus areas for this project, which will eventually be rolled out across three regions, including Jordan and Bangladesh.

Talent Development is one of the projects from the Start Build portfolio that forms part of the DFID Disaster and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP). This is a ground-breaking three-year programme that will invest £40m to improve the quality and speed of humanitarian response in countries at risk of natural disaster or conflict related humanitarian emergencies. It will do this by increasing and strengthening the capacity of the humanitarian system, with a focus on local humanitarian workers at the national level. The DEPP has identified networks critical to developing preparedness capacity, pre-selecting the Start Network and CDAC Network to deliver the majority of the DEPP programme.

Save the Children UK is the lead agency for the Talent Development project, which combines some of the best training programmes for humanitarian aid workers at all levels of their development. This includes an entry-level trainee scheme led by Save the Children UK, a mid-level Context programme led by Oxfam GB, and a Leadership for Humanitarians Training programme led by Relief International. There is also a cross-cutting strand led by People In Aid which will develop an in-house coaching cohort and a network of locally and regionally-based coaches. Together these activities aim to strengthen the skills of 1165 national humanitarian workers, including 175 fast-track places to prepare humanitarian leaders of the future.