For a sustainable improvement of educational planning and management capacities, many countries need a national centre specialized in this area. The decline of existing centres or the sheer absence of national training opportunities help explain the disintegrated nature of many training programmes and the continued reliance, even for short workshops, on outside institutions.
The existence of a national centre, with a clear mandate in training and research in educational planning and management, is probably a precondition to developing a coherent and locally owned training programme.
This issue needs to be addressed with some urgency, especially as policies of decentralization demand that district and provincial staff play key roles in designing and implementing policies and plans. The training of staff based at provincial and district levels in most cases needs to be taken care of by a national or regional centre.
IIEP provides support to strengthen national training centres or institutes. IIEP helps staff to improve their training skills so that they can transfer what they have learned to their colleagues in order to have a long lasting impact. IIEP is partnering with centres in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Jordan, Lao PDR, Morocco, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
