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TTi Projects Underway

As we reported back in August 2009 the Transport Training Initiative was established to fulfil one objective: to improve human capacities in the transport sector of developing countries. TTI hopes to achieve this through an international network of individuals and institutions. The main focus is to train transport experts in their motherland using national training institutes, teachers and appropriate curricula. TTI has two new calls for participation:

1) New Consortium to develop transport training courses in developing country universities

Sustainable transport is an important component of a sound development process in developing countries. Within this project a training course at partner universities is developed that focuses on sustainable transport.

The course is divided in 10 modules that may be used flexibly, as part of a larger curriculum or as standalone courses.

The planned course will provide a comprehensive view on essential issues related to sustainable transport that reflects the state of the art on sustainable transport in developing countries. For this purpose training material will be composed in a manner that enables local lecturers to include it in their curricula.

The following deliverables are planned:

1. Instructions for lecturers on the curriculum and the conduct of the lessons 2. Power Point presentations, each covering one module.

3. Documents and training materials for students in electronic format.

4. Background reading materials for lecturers.

5. Instructions and materials for the design of practical exercises

If you are interested in joining a bidding consortium then please contact Niklas Sieber directly through the TTi website:

http://www.transport-training-initiative.org/

2) Call for Abstracts: Training for Sustainable Transport in Developing Countries
This session will take place at the 12th World Conference on Transportation Research, 11th - 15th July, 2010 Lisbon, Portugal.

Human Capacities are the major bottleneck for many transport activities in developing countries. Often ministries are understaffed, positions remain vacant or are endowed with under-qualified personnel. Private enterprises have similar problems to find adequately trained staff, especially when engineering skills are required.

Unqualified staff, missing entrepreneurial and technical experience is one of the main reasons for the low performance of many local road construction companies, which gives them practically no chance when bidding for lucrative large scale construction projects. Therefore, their works are rather confined to small scale maintenance contracts.

One of the main reasons for human capacity constraints can be found in developing countries’ training institutions. Often they conduct little dynamic capacity building activities and especially lack a training approach that focuses on the unique problems of developing countries. In some countries transport specialists, such as engineers, economist and planners are not trained at all, in other countries education is subject to severe constraints, caused by inappropriate curricula, missing of specialised teaching staff, inadequate libraries and lack of other training material and equipment. This results in a low number of trained personnel and comparatively low skilled alumni of Developing Country training institutions. Often students are not trained on sustainable transport issues. As a reaction to the low performance of the national training institutes, many students seek education in neighbouring or industrialised countries.

Your abstract:

Shall explain how the above constraints and challenges can be overcome and how the learning conditions at training institutes can be improved. For example best-practice-examples of training sessions on sustainable transport, structures and contents of curricula appropriate for developing countries, successful implementation and financing schemes, etc. The abstract should not be longer than 300 words.

Full Paper:

A full paper is not required, but may be published if you wish to.

Funding:

Presenters are not exempt from WCTR fees. Participants from Developing Countries receive a reduction. Travel and subsistence cost have to be carried by the participants. TTi will support members from Developing Countries in seeking funding from donors.

Organiser: Transport Training Initiative TTi.
TTi is a non-profit association that aims to improve human capacities in the transport sector of Developing Countries. The main focus is to train transport experts in their motherland on sustainable transport using national training institutes, teachers and appropriate curricula.

Contact:

Dr Claus Doll, Karlsruhe Germany

e-mail: Claus.Doll[at]isi.fraunhofer.de

Dr Niklas Sieber, Stuttgart, Germany

e-mail: niklas.sieber[at]gmx.de

Deadline:

February 15, 2010