Quality and Impact in Development Education: DEEEP Summer School 2011 in Finland

The Development Education Summer School (DESS) 2011 was organized in cooperation with DEEEP and KEHYS, the Finnish Development NGO Platform to the EU. The Summer School brought together around 70 development education practitioners from around the globe to spend one week at a lakeside location in Southern Finland with a mission to reply to challenging questions: What do we mean by quality and impact? What do we want to achieve and what is our vision? What can we do better and what kind of ways are there to measure how we are doing?

The DESS 2011 also featured a strong Multi-Stakeholder component. Half a dozen members of the European Multi-Stakeholder group on Development Education visited the DESS 2011 for half a day, participating in one of the working group sessions and a thematic session led by expert Bobby McCormack, focusing on evaluation. KEHYS in cooperation with the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs organized an international conference “Social Change – Impact and Evaluation in Development Education and Awareness-Raising” in Helsinki on the 16th of June. The conference gathered nearly 200 participants ranging from Development Education experts to interested beginners and from ministry officials to researchers, business sector and NGO representatives, including the DESS 2011 participants. The keynote speaker at the conference was Mr. Martin Kirk, Head of Campaigns at Oxfam GB. Mr. Kirk presented his research on why and how to use positive values and frames when communicating and planning the activities of development NGOs (more infomration at http://www.findingframes.org/).

International organizations were also featured at the conference as Mr. Mark Richmond, the Director of the Division of Education for Peace and Education for Sustainable Development at UNESCO spoke in the opening plenary and in the final panel. Between the plenary sessions, conference participants picked a workshop of their choice out of eight different themes such as “Creating a message” or “Social media strategies”, led by experts and followed by group work on the topic. After the conference the Summer School participants explored the Finnish development education scene in Helsinki in small groups which visited different NGOs in the afternoon.

Memorable experiences, from boat-rowing on the lake to debating on the definition and measurement of impact filled the days and nights of the Summer School. The working groups of the Summer School discussed critically and contributed to the creation of a common European quality framework on development education. If you want to know more about the content of the DESS 2011, please contact your national DARE Forum representative and follow the DEEEP website where the reports of the four different working groups and other DESS related material will be uploaded in the course of autumn: http://www.deeep.org/.

Information provided by Riikka Suhonen, KEHYS