Why are the Academy training materials only available for Partners?

One of the key reasons the Academy was set up is to make sure that oil palm smallholder training materials are widely distributed among supporting organisations across the world. In practice, training materials are not often shared between organisations, and many are left to their own devices to develop their own curriculum, which can be time-consuming, costly, and result in reinventing the wheel.

The Academy strives to reach as many organisations globally as possible and to include them as Partners in the Academy Network. While it would be possible for the Academy to publish the training materials publicly on its website and potentially reach an even larger audience, it was decided not to do this, for several reasons:

• The primary objective of the Academy is to promote sustainable livelihoods of smallholders across the globe through building training capacity, which involves more than the training materials themselves alone;
• The Academy seeks to build organisations' training capacity and believes it is key to build a global community of (Master) Trainers;
• The Academy would like to have an insight on how its training materials and master training affect the training programmes of organisations across the globe, which is unlikely to happen if all training materials are distributed without any insight as to what happens with them;
• Through a global Partner Network the Academy believes it will ultimately have a higher impact and insights in its impact on the ground.