DEVELOPMENT AWARD - FINALIST

 

Luis Eleazar Institutional Development Specialist / Deputy Team Leader Southern Philippines Irrigation Sector Project

 

Luis is an outstanding professional who has an ability to successfully promote project outcomes within the international scene.  Presentation of numerous conference papers, which he produced about project experiences and approaches, have been widely acknowledged within the academic world.

The SPISP uses a participatory stepwise process to build the institutional capacity of farmer organisations.  Because of time constraints, the standard participatory process had to be compressed.  As an institutional development specialist, Luis successfully guided and assisted counterpart staff towards a modification of steps that still maintained the integrity of the training and development of the farmer organisations.  Luis’ efforts allowed a compression of process without sacrificing training content.  Normally the training of counterpart staff would require three years, this has now been reduced to two years.

Luis encouraged counterpart staff to use cross-visit training, as activities developed in their subprojects.  Because each subproject is at a different stage of development, it was advantageous for farmers from slower developing subprojects to visit faster developing subprojects as a training exercise.  This information sharing proved to be mutually beneficial to participants of both slower and faster subprojects.