IDEA is delighted to announce the return of its Lunchtime Webinar Series!

The pilot series ran last Summer and we received such positive feedback that we have decided to make it a feature of our capacity-building activities for development educators. The Webinar Series allows us to engage with interesting speakers from all over the world. It is also an accessible way for IDEA members to keep up to date with global development issues, without having to leave their home or office!

All you need to be able to join in a webinar is a computer connected to broadband and a separate phone line. We use Ready Conference Plus, a service from Webex. You can find out about the system requirements for your computer here. We use a separate teleconferencing service to ensure audio quality.

The webinar format is very simple. We introduce and welcome everyone, making sure all participants are comfortable with the online facilities. The presenter then speaks for about 25 minutes. This is followed by about 25 minutes of questions and answers moderated by IDEA staff. Presentations and documents are shared afterwards. A recording of the session is also available, dependent on permission from the speaker.

Speakers for the New Lunchtime Series

NEXT!

November 9th

Peggy Antrobus: Climate Change: A Small Island Developing States and Feminist Perspective

Dr. Peggy Antrobus is from the Caribbean and is founding member of DAWN (Development Alternatives for Women in a New Era) and author of "The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues, Strategies" She has worked in the field of development in the Caribbean for most of her life, witnessing the impact of globalisation and climate change on the populations of these islands.

Download and read Peggy Antrobus' paper on Climate Change: A Small-Island Developing STate and Gendered Perspective. (PDF 179kb)

Download and read Peggy Antrobus' Powerpoint Presentation. (ppt 9mb)

Peggy was a Global educator last year for IDEA's Beyond 2015 Learning Programme.

Read some of Peggy Antrobus' articles on the MDGs on our Beyond 2015 Learning Portal

Register here for the Webinar "Climate Change: A Small Island Developing States and Feminist Perspective" by emailing eimear@ideaonline.ie

More Speakers will be added to this page as they are confirmed so watch this space!

Email Eimear for more information- eimear@ideaonline.ie

Past Speakers:

October 26th

Marc Maxson and Dr. Irene Guijt: Storytelling and Development in East Africa

Global Giving is a charity fund-raising site that connects individual donors to grassroots organisations and social enterprises anywhere in the world. To monitor the impact of the many community-based projects Global Giving donors were supporting they developed and piloted a story-based method that revealed what people in various communities believed they needed, what services they were getting, and what they would like to see happen in the future.The thousands of stories collected were analysed and presented in an interactive map, allowing the voices of all the storytellers to shine through, whilst the patterns and themes emerging from their collected tales were used by Global Giving to improve their work.

Marc Maxson is a PhD neuroscientist who helps coordinate the GlobalGiving Storytelling project in East Africa, a monitoring and evaluation experiment that aims to provide all organizations with a richer, complex view of the communities they serve (See www.globalgiving.org/story-tools/ for details). He was formerly a Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia (1999-2001) and did a Fulbright research project around the impact of computers and the Internet on rural education in West Africa. You can read Marc's fascinating blog here:

chewychunks.wordpress.com

Irene Guijt (PhD) has a passion for  learning-oriented knowledge processes in international development. She conducts research, designs processes, and conducts training on innovative thinking on monitoring and evaluation that enhances learning. She has worked with a wide range of multilateral and non-governmental international development organizations and foundations working in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Currently, her work includes a strong focus on narrative-based evaluation approaches, to understand their potential and pitfalls. Six themes hold her interest: the process of sensemaking once the data has been collected; citizen’s voice and how it can inform policy and practice; the theory of monitoring; values and how these are espoused and practiced, narratives as data, and the politics of evaluation.

For more information on Global Giving and their use of storytelling see:

www.globalgiving.org/stories (Overview)

http://www.globalgiving.org/story-tools/ (Details about adaption of the method)

Register for the Webinar "Storytelling and Development in East Africa" by by emailing eimear@ideaonline.ie

October 19th

Silla Sigurgeirsdóttir: Iceland's Loud NO

The small island of Iceland has lessons for the world. It held a referendum in April to decide, more or less, whether ordinary people should pay for the folly of the bankers (and by extension, could governments control the corporate sector if they depended on it for finance). Sixty per cent of the population rejected an agreement negotiated between Iceland, the Netherlands and the UK to pay back the British and Dutch governments for the money they spent to recompense savers with the failed bank Icesave. That was less resistance than the first referendum last spring, when 93% voted no.

Silla Sigurgeirsdottir is lecturer in public policy at the University of Iceland. She lived in London from 1998 to 2007 while finishing her masters and PhD degrees in Social Policy and Public Policy Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Silla has worked for the Icelandic government as a strategic policy adviser at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health from July 2007, the month the stock market started to fall on Wall Street, and until the autumn of 2008 when the three big Icelandic banks collapsed and crushed the rest of the Icelandic economy.She has written about Iceland's recent crises in Le Monde Diplomatique and the New Left Review.

Download Silla Sigurgeirsdottir's presentation here.