The contexts in which the British and Afghans learn, train, and work are clearly different. Their cultures are different. They relationships with others members of society are different. Even their languages are not the same. But as professional soldiers they share a lot more and this is sufficient to learn from each other. The model has worked so well that even the Americans are now ready to replicate it (they are 18 months behind the British on this one).<\/p>\n
One of the best quotes from the article is from Brigadier Patrick Saunders:<\/p>\n
“Sheren Shah (Commander of the Afghan National Army) is our boss., it is as simple as that. We are not here to produce British soldiers. We are not here to replicate the British Army. We are preparing the ANA to function without us.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The point I am trying to make is that when it comes to supporting think tanks in developing countries maybe the best way forward is to try to get people with experience in the things that the think tanks want to learn about to spend some time working there. It sounds expensive but the fact is that there are plenty of young yet experienced researchers, communicators, and managers who are actively looking for opportunities to work in developing countries. They may not know much about their contexts but they are sufficiently smart of understand them and adapt their approaches to match. By spending time with their hosts they will be able to learn about the nuances of the organisations, advice on new approaches and methods, introduce new attitudes (often think tank researchers tell me that what they need is someone to encourage them to ‘think less as academics’), and even links to global networks.<\/p>\n
Researcher to researcher; communicator to communicator; manager to manager. Forget intermediaries (unless, of course, its to build the capacity of intermediaries).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few years ago, the BBC showed a series of programmes on ‘the toughest places to be …’. One of these shows was about the\u00a0toughest place to be a midwife\u00a0and it featured a midwife from the Midlands visiting Liberia to work with peers there. The differences between the British and the Liberian midwife’s work conditions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[295,409,599,598],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}