The Training Academy aims to provide tailor-made, targeted, high-quality trainings in line with the six thematic areas set out by Prague Process Action Plan:
- Preventing and combating illegal migration
- Promote readmission, voluntary return and sustainable reintegration
- Legal migration and mobility, with special emphasis on labour migration
- Promote the integration of migrants legally residing in host societies
- Make migration and mobility positive forces of development
- Strengthening of capacities in the field of asylum and international protection
In a rapidly changing environment, continuous training is a prerequisite to improve everyday work performance and develop further skills and competencies. This is why the Training Academy provides different training opportunities to Prague Process state representatives working in the areas of migration and asylum. Through its training-of-trainers approach, it equally aims to contribute to enhanced training capabilities, allowing for the independent organisation of trainings at national and local levels.
To ensure quality, the Academy features a continuously expanding network of state and non-state trainers from the region, as well as a growing library of training materials in Russian and English used during the actual trainings. The activities of the Training Academy also include expert missions and study visits that allow reviewing the existing national approaches to capacity building and continuous learning within state administrations. The resulting expertise benefits the Prague Process participating states. The Training Academy serves as a laboratory for generating concrete new project and cooperation ideas for the Prague Process and MPF purposes.
The Training Academy’s online library features both the previously developed Prague Process Handbooks and newly elaborated training materials. The library also serves the wider dissemination and use of training materials produced in other ICMPD projects and thereby contributes to policy coherence and complementarity among various EU-funded capacity-building initiatives in the region. Moreover, the Prague Process participating states can use this space to share their national capacity-building strategies, training curricula, and other relevant educational materials. Ultimately, this shall contribute to the exchange of good practices, lessons learned, and useful recommendations among the responsible state authorities.
In 2021, the Training Academy launched its E-learning Platform, meant to serve the Prague Process states and partners with educational material for self-paced independent remote learning. In times when in-person learning is reduced, e-learning tools become a safe and effective alternative to face-to-face classroom settings offering a convenient way for busy professionals to gain, enrich or refresh knowledge on migration matters. The platform hosts online courses in English and Russian that can be repeated multiple times and adjusted to individual schedules without the risk to lose progress. Upon completing a course, successful participants receive a certificate of completion. Access to all courses is granted upon registration on the platform.
Background
During the 3rd Ministerial Conference in 2016, the participating states agreed to establish the Prague Process Training Academy in order to address the capacity-building needs of the Parties in a more structured and tailor-made way. The Training Academy was launched in 2018 within the framework of the Prague Process: Dialogue, Analyses and Training in Action (PP DATA) initiative representing Strand C of the Migration Partnership Facility (MPF).
It builds upon the products and activities of the EU-funded Prague Process Targeted Initiative (PP TI) project, implemented in 2012-2017, and two Prague Process umbrella projects: ERIS project and EaP-SIPPAP project. The projects resulted in the joint elaboration of various publications, all of which can be found in the Repository.