Project planning

Today we had a long day of project planning work. I was picked up by Bibiana Pinto, the academic leader of our project work in the Bolivar province, at 8 in the morning. We drove to the SENA training center for mining & agri-business which Bibiana manages, and we started our work at 9 am after being joined by Juan Guillermo Carvajal, the manager of a similar training center in the neighbouring province of Antioquia. If you have followed my posts from late May and early June you might recognize Bibiana and Juan Guillermo, because they both joined me for a visit to Canada

We were also joined by Sandra Castaneda, who is the project coordinator for SENA in Bogota, and by two of Bibiana's program coordinators. The discussions centered around a reflection on the work done so far and on the visits to Canada, on the terms of reference we are working on for the five to-be-selected Canadian colleges (to work with SENA on the project implementation from early 2014 to late 2016 during three years) and on a number of activities scheduled for the period from August to December this year. The discussions were sometimes "heated".....

... but without a good amount of passion for this social inclusion work, one will never get any results under the challenging circumstances. We planned & schemed....

... and compared with theoretic models from the national Ministry of Education....

One of the challenges in our project is that the target population has a very low level of formal education and most of them therefore miss what we call in Canada the "essential skills", the levels of reading, writing and math required as a starting level for most of the SENA training programs.

Sandra and Sandra offered many good arguments as a trained lawyer (and now passionate advocate for social inclusion) and mining engineer (Sandra Torres lived and worked in the south of Bolivar for eight years right after graduating from university), and of course Bibiana and Juan Guillermo can put these suggestions in a good perspective with their many years as managers within and outside of the SENA organization. This team "rocks"....

Exactly 12 hours after leaving my hotel, Bibiana dropped me off again at 8 pm. A long but productive day. I decided to treat myself on a nice crepe in the restaurant "Crepes & Wafles" which is a national franchise with not only lovely food but also an excellent corporate social responsibility agenda and reputation. They hire for the serving (and most kitchen) staff only single mothers....

Tomorrow back to Bogota.