Educators' Network News

• Anna Karume, ITF Africa Education Coordinator

• Africa Education Planning Meeting
• Developing Andean educators
• ITF Southern African educators’ network takes off

 

Anna Karume, ITF Africa Education Coordinator

Anna Karume is the new ITF Africa education coordinator based at the Africa regional office in Nairobi. She sees motivating trainers to build enthusiasm and initiatives needed for organising locally and responding to the global organising challenge, as key priorities for unions in the region. Anna believes that education is a key tool in trade union organising. She argues therefore that it is essential for unions to allocate resources to education and build education structures in order to increase members’ participation and learning.

Anna’s background is in railways, following in her father’s footsteps. He was a senior rail personal officer. Her career began when she joined the railway training school in 1982 as a railway clerk and then became Assistant Station Master in 1983. During this training she came face to face with the discriminatory nature of the railway staff personnel regulations relating to married women. The lecturer advised her to approach a union once she was in employment in order to challenge the regulations.

Involvement in trade union activity began with participation in union seminars, finally leading to being elected as the first woman branch secretary in 1991. Since then Anna assumed a number of roles including Women’s Affairs Coordinator on the National Executive Board.

Her career as an educator began in 1994 as the implementer of a health and safety project in railways supported by LO-TCO in Sweden. This was followed by work with the American Solidarity Centre involving the overseeing of education programmes across the board, a role she assumed until her appointment as ITF Africa education coordinator last year.

On the joys of education work

“I really enjoyed every moment of working with workers, the most enjoyable and motivating moments being the conclusion of training or workshops and implementation of the action plans by participants, leading to change of attitudes, improvement of workers living standards using the skills and knowledge acquired from the workshops.

Just before I left the Solidarity Centre, we were jointly implementing a paralegal training program with COTU (K).  It was one of the most successful programmes that I have ever implemented as a workers’ educator. Today workers’ representatives are confidently representing workers before Industrial Court judges with ease and without fear or doubt".

On the challenges of education work

“The key challenges were non-implementation of actions plans from the workshops, poor dissemination of information to other workers, low participation of women workers during the training as well as the shrinking of funding during ongoing activities”.

Other problems included workers not sharing information among themselves, the lack of integration of basic trade union education in the current trade union education activities and inadequate resources to enable the department to satisfy the education needs of all transport sectors within ITF.

On solutions to challenges

Developing a training kit or tools on communication and report writing skills, developing a comprehensive trade union curriculum and introducing an award system after completion of any training; strengthening the educators’ network to share knowledge and solve education problems.

A last word for African affiliates:

To the African affiliates - appreciate ourselves, go out in full blast and recruit more members in order to become more sustainable economically and to strengthen ITF both in the region and globally. Promote democracy at the workplace and the effects will automatically be felt within our societies and communities.

Anna replaced Wairimu Mwangi in the Nairobi Office in October 2007. We would like to thank Wairmu for her hard work and contribution to ITF education.

 

Africa Education Planning Meeting

The idea for an Africa Education Planning meeting stemmed out of the outcomes of the Africa regional committee meeting where education formed part of the discussions. the meeting has been scheduled to start from 18- 21 February 2007, in Johannesburg South Africa.

The overall aims of the seminar is to determine the education priorities for the region and how these could be implemented bearing in mind the ITF work programme of Organising Globally.

In particular the meeting will aim to cover the following:

• Review of affiliate capacity by looking at human and financial resources. Particularly the number of Activists that have gone through various types of ITF training an how they are used in the union. 
• Identify any possible gaps in order to strengthen the workers education in Africa to cope with OG objectives and challenges.
• Translate the out comes of the African Regional Committee meetings into educational policy proposal activities/actions.
• Strengthen partnership between the regional office and the education department.

 

Developing Andean educators

As part of the ITF/LO-TCO Training Trainers’ project, educators from the Andean region were trained to develop collective bargaining skills and shop steward training. The seminar was held in Bogotá, Colombia, from 14 to 17 August 2007.

18 educators and union leaders including four women from 4 countries participated.

The main objective was to share ITF tools to develop and enrich the education projects of their unions.  An essential part of the training was on globalisation, international links and Regional Market Agreements.

Recent ITF education materials, such as the strategic campaigns manual, transport logistics module etc were presented and followed by group work to develop techniques and motivate their use.

On the first day we were visited by a group of fraternal union leaders who were interested in knowing and understanding the ITF. They therefore participated during the presentation of “Introducing the  ITF” module.

Sangam Tripathy from ITF Education Dpt and Gabriel Mocho the ITF Americas Education Coordinator facilitated the four day programme. Gabriel Mocho
 

ITF Southern African educators’ network takes off

Sharing ideas and information on trade union education and identifying industrial issues around which national and sub regional campaigns and educational activities can be planned, will be some of the starting points for the Southern African educators’ network for transport unions. This was the key outcome at the end of a 4 days workshop organised in Johannesburg from 28-31 May, 2007. The ITF education department will facilitate linkages to the educators extranet for the members of the network, so that they can use it as a communication tool and also have access to all the ITF education material online.

Twenty educators from Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa discussed various issues ranging from organising and strategic campaigns and how education can be adapted to meet some of these challenges. Ideas on development of low cost education and finding effective ways to support such initiatives were also discussed.

Strategic campaigning was discussed in detail and participants through group discussions identified key industrial issues and target companies and developed campaign strategies. It is envisaged that some of these issues will be taken up by the union leadership for further discussion in the ITF Southern African planning meeting to be held in the week of 18th June 2007. 

Educators at the workshop were encouraged to link with other ITF activities in the region, as a means of developing the network and collaboration within network.

The network will be coordinated by one of its members for the first six months, after which the responsibilities will rotate among the other network members.