Leadership training: Last mile delivery

Since our inception, CLI’s greatest challenge has not been in designing a leadership training program, but in implementing it. As we are all discovering today with a challenging global vaccine rollout, creating a new product is hard enough, but delivering it to individual people is even harder.

In CLI’s case, we have learned over time that the key actors in the delivery of our “leadership vaccine” are our local partner organizations. These groups exist within and among Congolese communities and they have names like Oneness Development Institute, SOCOODERA, and Association Paysanne pour l’Autosuffisance Alimentaire. The leaders and staff of these groups are CLI’s true heroes.

The DRC’s social infrastructure is quite unstructured, and is home to thousands of groups like our partners that exist for the good of neighbors, family, and anyone else in a small community. Our expansion has been possible because we work within and among these groups to deliver leadership training to the youth who they know and serve. Our curriculum material and classroom engagement have been stronger for these partnerships as well.

Now, we are taking this commitment to another level.

Starting this year, our local partners will be more than a channel through which we deliver training to Congolese youth. Like the youth themselves, they will be recipients of CLI’s in-kind and financial support to build their own capabilities and capacity. Our belief is that by strengthening our local partners, entire communities of youth (including but not limited to those in our program) will benefit.

We are devoting time and energy in order to offer training, curricula, and connection between partner groups to pursue this goal. This includes financing for locally-led programs like APAA’s celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, advanced skills training for facilitators at each site, and connections for local partners with international groups that can reduce costs and drive increased donation revenue.

Our partners have made it possible for CLI to grow the way we have. In order to continue and accelerate this growth for another ten years, we are thrilled to be investing in them today.