Eurasia Hub delivers courses for civil society advocates, government officials, journalists, parliamentarians and other actors working to improve the management of oil, gas and minerals. The Hub offers a comprehensive course on the extractive industries decision chain and thematic courses in issues relevant to the Eurasia region, such as on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), revenue management and economic diversification in period of low commodity prices.
Our approach focuses on learning through participants’ own experiences, and uses sustained debates and policy labs to allow participants to apply new knowledge to their professional roles. Courses encourage participants to examine and debate the pros and cons of policy decisions from various angles.
Eurasia Hub’s trainings classify as following:
The course is 8-days long. Based on the Natural Resource Charter, this course helps participants understand the linkages between extractive sector transparency, accountability and management issues as an integrated system. This course helps participants to comprehend EI transparency, accountability and management as an integrated system with forward and backward linkages; and also to have a clear understanding of the impact of individual elements of this chain on the whole, their dependency and consistency of rationale.
Based on regional needs, the hub offers basic auxiliary courses in addition to core courses on the EI value chain and technical trainings. The hub provides EITI courses for a number of countries (Albania, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Ukraine) as these countries work towards validation and compliance statuses. EITI Essentials courses run for countries that have not yet signed up for the initiative but would benefit from revenue transparency, and the opportunity for civil society to work with government and companies as part of a multi-stakeholder group. Such agenda-setting courses would target countries such as Turkmenistan, where very little traction has been gained in democratic governance.
Another auxiliary course will be offered on EI contracts for as long as it remains a topical subject for a group of countries in the region (Afghanistan, Albania, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia). Some of these auxiliary courses will be offered in different countries in the region.
Auxiliary courses are short (3 days long) and have a specific goal-oriented character. The content of these courses will be delivered progressively on a multilevel basis, e.g. including knowledge and skills in that field.
The Eurasia Hub has identified revenue management as the main priority theme for the region. This module’s approbation process has already been initiated by conducting several workshops where a model developed by RWI was further improved through engagement of regional experts.
The Hub will continue to pay attention to this topic because it has significant social-political-economic importance for the entire region and its various countries, and also considering its practical importance for governance and from a practical standpoint.
Within the framework of this topic, the Hub identifies the following issues as primary foci to be addressed in the module: how to build diversification away from extractives into government policies in the short and long term; how to form a government policy for spending sovereign wealth/natural resource funds; how CSOs can oversee governments in these activities; how CSOs can assist governments in the development of alternative programs that will lead to transformational human and economic development.
These trainings will have very practical significance as they will provoke various scenarios and explore avenues for the formation of more operational policies. Considering the special significance of the topics for decision-makers in particular, both parliamentarians and representatives of the executive institutes of the government will be engaged in trainings.
The ToT courses are conducted for a selected team of successful Hub alumni from each training, which gives them an opportunity to improve skills in delivering hands-on trainings on extractive industries. The objective of the trainings is to provide participants with knowledge, tools and skills on training processes and methods. ToT Courses are offered in an interactive mode and are delivered by professional trainers from the New York-based Natural Resource Governance Institute. ToT topics include “Revenue Management and Economic Diversification” and subjects of auxiliary courses such as “Legal and Fiscal Framework of Extractive Industries”. The language of the course is English.