Project assistance completion report : partners of the Eastern Caribbean training project

training opportunities to participants from the Eastern Caribbean in the areas of business, tourism, nontraditional agriculture, youth leadership (including drug abuse education) and, to a lesser extent, emergency preparedness. Project was implemented by the Partners of the Americas. Evaluation covers the period 7/86-7/89. The project trained 223 short-term and 1 long-term candidate in the United States. Of these, 125, or 55%, were women (USAID targeted 40%), and 170 were from the private sector. Of the fields of study offered under the project, business was the most popular, with 149 persons being trained in this area. Additionally, the Grenada-Broome County Partnership was successfully established and 12 Grenadians received training through this Partnership. The following lessons were learned. (1) The project was affected by a number of implementation problems stemming from the weak institutional framework of the Eastern Caribbean Partnerships. This was largely reflected in the Partnerships" inability to process applications and prepare documentation for training in a timely manner. One result of these slow implementation efforts was that project achievements, with respect to individual training, were less than planned and RDO/C was forced to intervene and use the group training mechanism in order to attain the targets originally projected. (2) Strictly volunteer organizations, operating without the necessary support staff, often lack the essential framework to execute developmental programs of any significant magnitude. Lack of support staff particularly affects participant training programs, which are extremely labor-intensive. (3) Lack of support staff also affects the trainee recruitment process; in some cases the best caliber candidates were not selected for training. (Author abstract)