The Hague Academy for Local Governance Training: The NUFFIC Fellowships
The Netherlands organisation for international cooperation in higher education (EP-NUFFIC) offers fellowships to participate in training courses in The Netherlands.
The aim is to promote capacity building within organisations in eligible countries via training and education for professionals. This is initiated and (almost) fully funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the budget for development cooperation.
The NUFFIC offers NFP and MSP fellowships. The NFP, the Netherlands Fellowship Programme, grants scholarships for participants living and working in one of the 51 countries mentioned on this list. (See list here)
The second fellowship, the MSP, the MENA Scholarship Programme, is designed for participants from the 10 participating countries from the Middle East and North Africa region. It aims at building capacity within organisations by enabling employees to take part in short courses in various fields of study. (See list here)
The training concerns the following courses:
1) Local Economic Development (19 – 30 September 2016)
This course discusses strategies and tools to manage inclusive and sustainable local economic development (LED) processes. It addresses questions on how to develop a joint vision for the area in a participatory manner, involving government, citizens, businesses and CSOs, how to promote job creation and entrepreneurship, how to improve conditions for business investments and small and medium enterprises and how to finance local economic development.
2) Local Service Delivery (3 – 14 October 2016)
In this course, participants learn how local governments can effectively deliver services to their citizens and how they can plan and finance it. They discuss questions such as how the different layers of government can work together to ensure basic services and reach the poorest people, how they can set up the financial management of services in a transparent and democratic way. In addition to how partnerships with NGOs and the private sector can help local governments to better deal with challenges in service delivery.
3) Conflict, Rule of Law and Local Security (7 – 18 November 2016)
The key issues in this training are: how governments can promote citizen security and protect human rights after violent conflict. What policies and instruments they have to implement to foster reconciliation and peacebuilding amongst different ethnic or religious groups. And what attitude and skills government officials need to lead conflict transformation processes.
These training courses are designed for local and regional governments’ employees and officials. They are encouraged to follow specific instructions in order to send their applications for one of the fellowships before the deadline, which is the 22 March 2016.
Access all the information about the fellowships, the courses, the application process and all the relevant details by visiting the website here.