Online Course: Changing Mindsets and Strengthening Governance Capacities in the Arab region

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN ESCWA) are co-organizing an Online Training Course on “Changing Mindsets and Strengthening Governance Capacities for Policy Coherence for a Holistic Implementation of the 2030 Agenda in the Arab region”. The Online Training Workshop will be held on 26 and 28 January and 2 and 4 February 2021 February 2021 for 2 hours each day.

The Online Training Course will promote critical understanding of sustainable development issues, enhance governance capacity, strengthen public servants' awareness of their active role in contributing to the achievement of the SDGs and develop the knowledge and capacities required to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

The Facilitated Online Training Course builds upon the Capacity Development Webinars on “Leveraging Public Governance & Exploring Innovative Solutions to Address the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Arab Region: Building better institutions, towards a brighter future” organized by UN ESCWA, UN DESA and UNESCO in June and July 2020.

UN DESA is developing a Curriculum on Governance for the Sustainable Development Goals. The Curriculum contains a capacity development training-of-trainers toolkit on “Institutional Arrangements and Governance Capacities for Policy Coherence” and one on “Changing Mindsets in Public Institutions to Implement the SDGs”. The objective of the Training Course is to pilot test selected modules of the toolkits and provide hands-on activities to identify priorities and action plans.

More specifically, the Online Training Course aims to:

1. Sensitize senior public officials from the Arab region about the need for effective institutional arrangements for holistic policy coherence as a vehicle for cooperation.
2. Promote awareness of the importance of changing mindsets for more effective coordination and collaboration.
3. Enhance knowledge about governance capacities for policy coherence and changing mindsets for sustainable development; planning and systems thinking; cross-governmental, and inter-ministerial collaboration, and multistakeholder engagement.
4. Identify key priorities and follow-up actions to promote policy coherence and changing mindsets in public institutions.
5. Receive feedback from the participants on the relevance of the toolkits to their national context.
6. Ascertain Member States’ demands for follow up capacity development on these issues at the national level.  

The Facilitated Online Training Course will be composed of four webinars that will each run for 2 hours. The recordings of the Sessions will be posted on the website after the conclusion of the Training. The follow-up actions, including key recommendations and the summary of the discussion, will be disseminated through the UN DESA and UN ESCWAA websites.

Click here for further details about the programme and registration.