The Certificate

So could this be about the relevance of a certificate at a workplace? What does a certificate (of attendance or participation) really mean at the workplace? We live in an age of skills retooling, refresher courses and many others. Do initiatives such as these build the required capacity in specialized areas such as policy analysis and advocacy? If this question had been posed prior to the workshop my answer would have been NO, but honestly I am persuaded otherwise although I would still want to qualify it with a BUT. Let me start with the BUT and I will spend more time reflecting on why I am thinking otherwise. Africa’s development is long overdue and needs adequately skilled people in the formulation, evaluation and revision of policy. Policy making and analysis has been largely a preserve of university and think tank experts. However, these technocratic approaches have also served to create an air of mystery around policy; we have come to think of it as a terrain of complicated equations, calculations, permutations — and in the process disempowered the African.

I have come to believe that we have been pursuing/emphasizing the wrong set of skills as part of a historical trajectory of development based on a form of ‘catch up’ thinking. As such we have valorized a certain type of education that mimics imported models (which in all fairness have worked in certain regions) but in the process we have failed to adequately pay attention to local knowledge and the manner in which communities frame the issues affecting them (a recent addition into my vocabulary). This scenario needs to change (especially in policy formulation and analysis), and the first step towards opening up this space is to develop confidence on the part of non-state community-based development actors. Resident within our faculty were specialist skills in deliberative democracy, community development and budget analysis. To be honest, they made development policy analysis sound so easy. Using participatory methodologies — including group work, skits and tools such as scorecards — they managed to demystify policy analysis and also made it look like a very exciting activity. I appreciate that this may sound like I am simplifying the process too much, but honestly it is that simple.

So, what about the certificate, you may ask. I believe the certificate of participation served a bigger symbolic role than we may recognize now. Initially we just viewed it as the icing on the cake (to lend credence to the process), but I have since come to realize that these certificates may have a more enduring value than we had envisaged. The manner in which the awards ceremony generated interest sort of unsettled me, especially considering that approximately 45 percent of the participants hold at least some form of tertiary education (degree or diploma). Have we become a continent hungry for validation through formal education? How are other forms of qualification/experience treated? Do we need to be certified to believe that we have the right skills for a task? What sort of skills do we celebrate: the academic decorations or lived experiences? Take away the preceding pessimism and think of how we can take advantage of the certification/validation process. I realized (selfishly) that if sufficient prestige is attached to a process it will most likely empower the beneficiaries. So why not use this desire for professional validation to certify or validate mechanisms that literally promote local knowledge and agency in policy analysis? I sincerely believe that we have laid the seed for a vibrant community of leaders within the participating organizations. Our next challenge is to ensure that indeed these seeds are nurtured, grow and multiply themselves and of course the certificate remains central to this process.

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