Capacity Building

Building capacities of its partners is crucial to the seamless working of NASSCOM Foundation’s network. Many of the issues, concerns and needs can find a solution in specialized training and facilitation programs, specially designed and conducted to address specific concerns. As a facilitating agency, NASSCOM Foundation has assumed this role and is putting special efforts to organize meaningful discussion and training platforms which in turn will pave the path for a better tomorrow.

NASSCOM Foundation builds the capacity of the NGO and the knowledge centre manager in entrepreneurship, in rolling out services, communication, outreach, budgeting and accounting, and overall monitoring and implementation of the program. The NGOs leadership is sensitized and middle management adequately trained on partner communication and report back mechanisms. Thus the NKN is designed to be adopted easily by NGOs and the corporates, thereby allowing room for scalability, both functional and quantitative.

The following are the various capacity building platform organized by NASSCOM Foundation to support NKN partners

National Consultation

This is planned as multi-stakeholder meet as well as a training program for the centre coordinators. The aim of the National Consultations is to provide a national platform for NKN telecentre managers to share their experience and learn from peers and experts. National Consultation is planned as a one and a half day conference covering key national issues of development and knowledge centres and telecentres can contribute to the development. Though various panel discussions, invited speakers from Industry, Government and Civil society, share, discuss and debate key issues of development. NKN NGO partners and centre managers also get an opportunity share their grassroots experience before a wider group of practitioners. Over 150 NKN managers from across the network attend these consultations.

NKN Partners meet

‘Partners meets’ are organized once every year, wherein leaders from NKN NGO partners come together to air their views, concerns, ideas and plans for the future. The concept of multiple partnerships is effective, especially when stakeholders with unique complementary strengths or core competencies add value to development efforts and pool their resources and assets in solving problems. With this in mind, till this date NASSCOM Foundation has organized saw various partner meets for the senior management team of partner agencies.

• Partners’ Meet, Delhi, April 2007:
  The first Partners’ Meet of NASSCOM Foundation wherein the partners shared their experiences and were informed about new government services available and how to link up to national level programs.
• Partners Meet, Secunderabad, October 2007:
  This program focused on sustainability planning for the knowledge centres. The program also focused on how services developed by network partners can be shared across the network
• Partners Meet, Delhi, November 2008
  The program discussed scale-up strategies and plans and partnership required for effective scale-up of the network. The participants also discussed the strengths and weakness of the network and monitoring and measurement of impact of the network
• Partners Meet, Delhi, November, 2009
  The program discussed the various business services available that can be rolled out though NKN centres. The meet also discussed challenges of power, connectivity and relevant local content and further discussed effective strategies for capturing impacts of the network.

NKN Coordinators Training program

The central challenge in running centres seems to revolve around the nurturing of a working relationship based on trust, mutual respect, open communication, and understanding among stakeholders about each other’s strengths and weaknesses. The most important considerations are - shared ownership, openness and transparency, capacity building, learning by doing and looking into what is already existing. Training plays an extremely important role in all of this and as the central facilitating agency; NASSCOM Foundation has to assume this role. A number of the training workshops are organised alongside the National Consultation and many of the NKN managers are encouraged to lead training sessions for their peers.

The following training programs have been organized so far :

• IT skills and hardware maintenance
• Training on NKN services
• How to run and manage a tetecentre
• Entrepreneurship for telecentres
• Communication and Marketing
• Accounting skills
• Leadership and soft-skills
• Documentation skill
• Photo and digital documentation of projects
• How to make centres sustainable and local content creation