The "Cities Feeding People Programme" of the International Development and Research Centre (IDRC- Canada) collaborated with the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Urban Management Programme (UMP-LAC/UN-Habitat; Ecuador) and IPES-Promotion of Sustainable Development (Peru) in the development and implementation of the first Regional Training Course on Urban Agriculture (UA). The project was originally planned for a 15 months period, from March 2001 till June 2002. In June, a project extension of six months was granted for further elaboration of the “raw” training materials produced during the course with the objective to facilitate the development of future (distance learning) courses.
The course, organised in the month of November 2001, allowed 12 “city-pairs” (formed by one representative of the local or federal government and 1 representative of the civil society), representing in total 11 cities of 8 different countries in the Region, to discuss and evaluate together proposals for action-research and concrete intervention in Urban Agriculture.
Through a series of 7 modules and pedagogic packages, different themes and methodologies were discussed to work out participatory strategies of research and intervention that support development of Urban Agriculture and its inclusion in urban planning and management. The general content of the course included case studies of projects, programs and policies on Urban Agriculture, research methodologies and worked on project and policy formulation in a city case study.
The training course provided a series of “raw” written and visual training materials that were organised and edited into a series of training aids. The aids include a written repository of thematic texts and concepts in form of a Course Binder, and that will incorporate the whole set of written and visual materials used in the LAC training course in form of a Training Kit. These materials will serve as reference material for training course participants and provide to future trainers the educational support to facilitate the reproduction of other (distance learning) Urban Agriculture Training Course
