The participants from the first Renewable Energy Programme had their Closing Session yesterday discussing their way forward. However there is no looking ahead without taking a few steps back to see what this wonderful group has accomplished during the programme.
Due to the Covid19 pandemic the Way Forward Phase for the REP 1 group had to be digital with everyone in the safety of their home or office. We all would have loved to meet – but we will in the future.
During the Closing Session the participants were divided into three smaller groups (Breakout Rooms) to discuss the following two questions:
- A) What are the main benefits that you take with you from the programme?
- B) Way Forward: How can you use the capacity developed during the programme to contribute to a more sustainable energy system?
There were a lot of important notes that were brought up and here are a few examples:
What are the main benefits that you take with you from the programme?
”Very important one is the networking. Because now we learned from others, we got experience from others, people from other countries. And I think that the networking will continue even after the end of this programme. The networking will continue so that we can continue exchanging experience, we can get information from other people, other countries. So it was very important for us to exchange experience, to learn from others.”
– Group 1
”The way you taught us I can assure you that you expected to give us an idea so that we can utilize, develop things, but I can assure you that you ended up developing better trainers. And this is another benefit, that you made trainers. We expect in the near future that we can do the same thing using this method that you used to teach others in the renewable energy sectors.”
– Group 2
”Amongst the benefits is that there were general benefits like we discussed that the programme was so well structured. It helped us in terms of our project management skills. Generally, the methodology that was followed was very useful, to maybe you know, add skill in terms of ourselves on how to run a project of this nature.”
– Group 3
Way Forward: How can you use the capacity developed during the programme to contribute to a more sustainable energy system?
”I think we all agreed that various countries had various change projects, which going forward if they really followed up to the end can assist in terms of policy formulations in different countries. They will obviously influence the policy makers as far as RE is concerned.”
– Group 3
”We are going to use the knowledge to assure that we improve the sustainable use of renewable energy. Another point is (…) that we are going to use the knowledge that we gained from the programme to finance other renewable energy projects with our eyes on renewable energy staff”
– Group 2
”We discussed that from what we learned from this programme, we are going to design new projects, we are able to design new projects in our offices and our institutions and we try to get financing in the country because there are a lot of finance institutions that can finance the projects, but before, maybe because of out of knowledge, we did not do it before but now from this knowledge we can design some projects.”
– Group 1