Kyoko Shimizu
Staff member, Asian Health Institute (AHI)

Asian Health Institute (AHI) is an NGO located in Nisshin City, Aichi Prefecture. Since 1980, we have been carrying out participatory training courses to help developing leadership skills of health development workers across Asia.  So far, 720 people from 30 countries have participated in our training courses.

Our office is equipped with the residential facilities and the training participants live and learn together there for 6 weeks. Having common purpose of creating communities where everyone can grow together and nobody is left behind, they discuss, analyze, and question status quo among themselves.  Different cultural and personal backgrounds as well as social activity experiences make the participant groups very diverse and unique.   They explore new ideas and different perspectives, put them into concrete activity plans to try out in their respective social activity fields back home. 

We had 9 pairs from Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Mongolia.

The year 2021 with the spread of COVID-19 was a challenging year. We decided to hold the course online for the first time. The course theme was “youth empowerment for making change.”  The participants were in pairs consisting of a member of a youth group actively engaging in local community issues and a staff member of the NGOs working with the youth group.

Participatory training course via online was the first experience for both of ourselves and the participants.  The biggest challenge was perhaps how we could create relationships where everyone feels at ease and can be open to one another in learning process despite the actual physical distance.

Communicating in non-native language (which is English in this case for everyone) is already hard for many of us even face-to-face. Online situation makes it even harder.   There was also one participant with hearing disability in the group.  Openly pointing out this challenge among the participants, they decided to write texts in the chat box to help one another. Writing up what’s being talked accurately requires asking the talkers for repetition and clarification.  It consumes time. However, without understanding one another, nobody learns.

In addition to supporting the language challenge, this practice also greatly helped the participants building collaborative and accepting relationship among themselves. They started to feel safe to stop the talker and ask to go slower when s/he went too fast.  They also exercised giving and receiving feedback to one another. It helped the participants self-reflect on how they engage themselves in the group and in the co-learning process.

One of the group works on the online application “Miro”. It made us to place sticky notes and draw diagrams as if we were working together on paper in a same room even if we were actually in different locations.

Carefully proceeding with the discussions and practices on what kind of and in what way they build relationship, they started to realize that relationship building is important not only among this group of training participants but definitely with their community members back home.  The process of collaborative, trusting and accepting relationship would give the youth members opportunities to gain confidence, to learn about teamwork, to understand the importance of sharing roles and responsibilities, which are some of the key elements of the youth empowerment. The participants explored that by themselves through their own experiences in the training.

Holding participatory training via online brings various issues, such as limiting participation to people with internet connections in place. On the other hand, the participants of the 2021 course demonstrated that the difficulties in understanding one another became learning material of its own to make us think of what inclusivity really meant.

In the year of 2022, AHI training will be held online again. We look forward to taking on this challenge again and learning together with the participants.

Pramo (NGO, left) and Ama (youth group, right) from Sri Lanka: They work together in the same local community. (*ILDC is the short name of this course.)

Pramo: “Until now, I thought that I had to always help Ama. I now understand that helping her with everything could be an obstacle to her self-growth.  I should trust her more and let her try.”

Ama: “I’ve felt that I was not experienced enough.  But during the training, I learned to be more confident and independent.  I am the only person who can say what I think. If I don’t say it, I will never learn.”

Upon return to their home, they organized and facilitated a five-day session for Ama’s youth group members.  The group discussed and learned the importance of building relationships and the effect of giving and receiving feedback in doing so.

* A short video clip has been produced by an AHI intern to introduce AHI’s online participatory training course. https://youtu.be/sFS0Nwhx0Yo