The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has been spearheading a series of initiatives aimed at sharing lessons learned, identifying gaps and building on institutional and methodological synergies in the field of participatory mapping. The 2005 Mapping for Change Conference, organized by CTA and the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), represented a landmark event where 154 practitioners from 45 countries convened to discuss the state of the art, potential and constraints, as well as the opportunities and threats of participatory spatial information management and communication; in this context, the lack of training material was identified as the major constraints in the spread of good practice.
In response to the 2005 Conference and subsequent on-line surveys, CTA, launched a project entitled “Support the spread of good practice in generating, managing, analysing and communication spatial information”. The project is financially supported by CTA, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), IKM Emergent and the Ford Foundation Brazil. The first phase of the project started in February 2008 and ended in September 2010. Its overall objective is to increase the capacity of indigenous and other marginalised peoples to engage in effective policy dialogue and advocacy. The output of the initiative consists in a freely available Multilingual, Modular, Multimedia Training Kit to be used in face to face capacity building events. The kit has been published in English and Spanish and is currently available. The Brazilian-Portuguese version is in the making and the French version will follow.
The Training Kit is designed for Technology intermediaries, working in multidisciplinary teams and operating within an institution or organisation already committed to practicing participatory mapping, and who are or would be required to deliver training on the practice or facilitate the process in the field. It offers the building blocks from which trainers will be in the position to design and build their own workshops according to the training needs of their audience/ participants/ target groups.