CSDi Online Courses Capture a True Field Experience
Are you a donor, a development practitioner, in a job transition, or a student who wants to learn more about what works in designing impact-oriented projects?

Our online courses use each class assignment as a concrete step in developing a real project within a real community. You will take an assignment into the field and use it as a solution-oriented activity that you do together with community members—thereby finishing one component of the project you are developing in the class. And there you have it: an online field course with tangible, concrete results.

Don’t have community access? No problem: we partner you with a fellow student in a developing nation who does. Click on the course links below to see syllibi, course fees, and to enroll.

	341. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 1: Designing & Funding CBA Projects. March 15 – May 16, 2011. Contemporary methods of developing sustainable, impact-oriented projects. Gain practical field experience using evidence-based activities & develop a real project in real time. Student CBA projects have included efforts to help communities in Yemen, Morocco, Tanzania and Cameroon recover from unprecedented droughts that exhausted their water sources.
	342. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 2: Planning for Impact. March 15 – May 2, 2011. Imbed impact into your adaptation project with a powerful set of management tools. LogFrames, detailed budgets, timelines, compelling fact sheets, M&E plans, outcomes and impact. These tools will communicate to donors and stakeholders exactly what you are trying to accomplish—and can be used for effective management of the project once funded.
	343. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 3: The Community Focus. May 17 – July 11, 2011. What does climate change adaptation mean at the community level? What practical tools are available today for communities to use in adaptation? Use local knowledge to learn about vulnerability, adaptive capacity & traditional strategies. For practitioners who wish to begin working now at the community level to successfully adapt to the challenges that face us.
	344. Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change 4: Sustainable Implementation. March 15 – May 2, 2011. How do you launch & implement a community-based adaptation project? The importance of community engagement. Developing skill sets for your community to use in the adaptation process. Learning tools: monitoring & evaluation. Community empowerment during project hand-over. Designing in sustainability, follow-up, mentoring & participatory M&E.

	303. Food Security, Nutrition and Home Gardens 1: March 15 – May 16, 2011. Implement a 12-month family gardening project. Develop a baseline of your community’s food security and nutritional levels. Learn about food security, good nutrition, and the garden activities that support them—and then learn how to build a project that puts your community on the path to using their own skills to address their specific needs. Become the Solution.
	304. Food Security, Nutrition and Home Gardens 2: March 15 – May 2, 2011. How do you care for & maintain a food garden? How do you control pests? What happens if you have desert soil—or a shortage of water? Learn how to combine garden produce with daily staples to prepare nutritious meals that contain vitamins A, C and D. Increase family understanding of kitchen hygiene, cooking, and nutrition—including using delicious nutrition-packed recipes.

	101. From the Ground Up: Designing & Funding Sustainable Projects. March 15 – May 16, 2011. Develop a Real Project in Real Time. We’ll walk you, step-by-step, through a community-based project using proven methods. Learn a range of skills including participatory needs assessments, community capacity building workshops, and evidence-based project design. You will learn strategies from others in the class facing similar challenges. Become the Solution.
	102. Project Architecture: Planning for Impact. March 15, – April 25, 2011. Imbed impact into your 101 project design with powerful management tools. LogFrames, detailed budgets, schedules, compelling fact sheets, M&E plans, outcomes & impact. These tools will communicate to donors & stakeholders exactly what your project will accomplish, and lead the effective management of the project once funded.

The Courses also Provide the Following Resources:

Weekly discussions, and assignment examples & templates
Documents on course topics by contemporary experts.
Books, posters and manuals available online for download.
Internet development links organized by sector.
Class forum for posting questions to your classmates.
Access to tools and resources on the Center site.
There are no books to buy—all course materials can be linked to, or downloaded from the course site.

Online course participants are using our courses to develop real, on-the-ground projects with real communities individually and through cross-hemisphere student partnerships. People from 92 different countries and 200 organizations have used our courses to develop projects that impact over 70,000 people.

Be sure to visit our Online Development Community to see groups that support our courses.

Would you like to learn more about what the courses are like? Just visit these pages:

Student Testimonials

International Partnerships

Learning Environment

Student Field Projects

Example Assignment: Kenya

Student Countries, Organizations, Project Challenges

In 1989 I was fortunate enough to visit the Green Belt Movement in Nairobi Kenya. The Green Belt Movement has been a successful reforestation program for over 30 years. It was started by Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai. I recently read her autobiography “Unbowed”, and was struck by how early in her career she realized that projects were less likely to be successful if there wasn’t community ownership from the onset.

“None of these projects lasted for long. I learned that if you do not have local people who are committed to the process and willing to work with their communities, the projects will not survive. This showed me that we needed to make local people feel invested in the projects so that they would mobilize themselves and their neighbors to take responsibility for sustaining them.

That was the beginning of communities themselves taking ownership of Green Belt Movement initiatives, and I have insisted on working this way ever since.” Unbowed. Wangari Maathai, 2006.

Start kindling community ownership with the Ten Seed Technique
	The Ten Seed Technique is my favorite for facilitating participatory needs assessments. The technique is a very visual one that allows the literate and illiterate to participate as equal partners and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. Each workshop participant is given 10 seeds as voting tokens to be used in prioritizing community needs.

Read the entire February 2011 Newsletter to see photos and access information on the 10 Seed process.

Top Down
Old-school development hasn’t always included communities in the process of assessing need, designing project activities, having a stake in project management, and full takeover at the end of the project. Contemporary development now sees this as paramount for maintaining the positive outcomes that contribute to long-term impact: improve your development results by fully engaging community members as partners and owners.

Bottom Up
The Center promotes developing successful projects that can be managed and sustained by communities:
1. work side-by-side with communities to develop long-term, sustainable adaptation programs
2. empower communities to take full charge of programs once up and running

Why is this important? A criticism of the traditional project cycle is that when an NGO completes its two-year project, they leave their community at the helm of project management without sufficient training and technical support—and perhaps even without much interest in the project. For example, how many communities have you been to and seen two-year-old water projects that no longer function?

We propose beginning on day one by creating partnerships with communities, fostering the improvement of community capacity for project management, and encouraging representative leadership to carry on with project activities long after you’re gone. This is the stuff of community based development: Communities are involved from the beginning and participate in each important step of the process.

What are your thoughts on the differences between Top Down and Bottom Up?

Be sure to visit the adaptation working group at CSDi’s Development Community. Join colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

Learn how to develop an community centered project.

Join: CSDi Development Community.

Like us: CSDi Facebook.

Matt Gray is spending a year as a researcher at the University of Mauritius in the Fulbright Program, and is also enrolled in OL 340: Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change.

Too much rain in May and drought conditions in November negatively affect farmers with both extremes. Rainfall is down 10 % but the intensity has increased. 50% of water stored in reservoirs is lost to leaks.

The film shows us how having supplies of water resources and managing them are 2 different things. Says Matt: “Along with the basics of adaptation, I want to learn the steps for doing an adaptation project by actually doing one”.

What are your thoughts on the responsibility of managing water in a water-rich country like Mauritius?

Be sure to visit the adaptation working group at CSDi’s Development Community. Join colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

Learn how to develop an adaptation project.

Join: CSDi Development Community.

Like: CSDi Facebook.