The WAFSP is a first-of-its-kind partnership between USAID and Peace Corps country programs in 11 countries throughout West Africa, and as part of USAID's Feed the Future initiative it focuses on innovative knowledge and skill exchanges across regional borders.
Skills Exchange brings together artists and community groups and makes a point of linking young artists and older people: out of a residency by artist Tom Hunter on the Woodberry Down estate in Hackney, east London, comes a film he made with older residents called A Palace for Us.
As an example, skills exchange from Syrian refugees towards host communities has been important to see displaced populations not only as victims of conflict but also as possessing key skills that contribute to the host communities.
They have taken part in a maths-Swahili video skills exchange with children in Kenya and raised $12,000 for water filters for children at school in Kibera slum, Nairobi.
If I want to learn a new skill, I study with experts, paying for their time or offering a skills exchange, before I bring that skill into my paid work.
The migration of health workers to the Caribbean is commonly viewed as creating new opportunities for training and skills exchange for local health workers.
This model, while building overtly on principles akin to those outlined above, develops the principles of academic-practice partnership and knowledge and skills exchange between the two sectors in a reciprocal manner.
The second embeds a model developed for general practitioners into a broader framework of practice-academic partnership and knowledge and skills exchange, and considers external drivers and impacts on practice and patient outcomes as key elements.
This partnership model takes the six areas offered by Farmer and Weston and places them in the context of the wider issues of (i) practice-academic partnership, (ii) knowledge and skills exchange, with emphasis also placed on the importance of identifying both (iii) the external drivers and (iv) the proposed impact on practice and patient outcomes.
It's vital we sit down with young people now and begin planning solutions aimed at creating fit-for-purpose educational systems, functional job-markets, efficient skills exchanges and the sustainable future we all depend on.
This method aims at designing the routing of activities, so as to meet the customers' needs in terms of cost, quality and delivery time (short-term performance constraints), and to promote learning processes and skills exchanges within the network (long-term performance criteria).
