About the Climate Skills programme
An initiative of the British Council, Climate Skills is a three-year programme (2023 – 2026) running in six countries: Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Vietnam and the UK. The programme works with young people, aged 18-30, to provide them with the skills and support they need to be resilient to the impacts of climate change and sow the seeds for a fair transition to greener societies. The programme does this through training, mentorship, grants, events, and employment opportunities. The programme is led by British Council in partnership with HSBC.
INTRAC’s role
INTRAC’s role in the programme has been to develop a training of trainers (ToT) for a small cohort of young people trained as youth evaluators. These Youth Evaluators contribute to the overall evaluation of the Climate Skills programme. INTRAC developed a set of asynchronous training modules that cover the key principles and practice of evaluation. The content is purposefully designed to be accessible and jargon-free, with the Youth Evaluators expected to have limited prior experience of monitoring, evaluation and research.
The ToT consists of four modules, which each follow a similar structure – four short videos, with accompanying questions, followed by a two-hour Zoom workshop to discuss the content. One of the modules also includes a real-world exercise for the trainees to complete (conducing an interview).
In addition to ensuring that the content created for the course was not too technical or jargon-heavy, INTRAC also took other steps to make the training accessible and genuinely useful. These included using easy-to-use platforms, such as YouTube for video lessons, and Google Classroom to host the course. INTRAC also ensured that the content was translated into Spanish and Portuguese (for both the text on the classroom and the video subtitles). In addition, the two-hour workshops where each module are discussed were facilitated in Spanish for the Mexico cohort and Portuguese for the Brazil group.
Next steps
Following completion of the training, the Youth Evaluators work with local partners to co-design and deliver research that helps address two key evaluation issues:
- How well the British Council and partners are engaging and supporting young people on the programme.
- Whether the programme is making a difference to the young people it engages, and their communities.
The Youth Evaluators will conduct research through two main methods: case studies and youth-led feedback.