Bolivia: Leadership and persuasion theme of III workshop on

Leadership and persuasion" will be the theme of the third workshop of the regional program on "Governance and Consensus Building" to be held from this Monday September 27 in Hotel Radisson in La Paz, Bolivia.

The program is sponsored by the Andean Development Corporation with the academic backing of Harvard University. This module is coordinated by experts from Cambridge International Consulting, Alberto Suárez and Vladimir Petit, with the participation of national and regional leaders.

With this third workshop, the "Governance and Consensus Building" program moves forward in its content, which has included the modules on "Strategic Communication" and "Governance and Consensus Building" held in the first half of the period. The cycle will be completed in November with the workshop on "Strategic Relations with the public sector."

The objective of the program is to provide social actors with a series of instruments and tools on negotiation, strategic communication and leadership which increase their efficiency in consensus building and generate value in the exchanges that necessarily take place between sectors of society.

The modules take the form of face-to-face workshops with dynamics aimed at the practical application of the new tools to the everyday problems that leaders have to deal with at all levels of the public administration and the institutions of civil society. The seminars have two versions, one for national institutions, and another for local and departmental institutions.

The CAF initiative supplements the actions taken to strengthen governance in the countries of the region. Similar workshops are being held in other Andean countries.

The program is developed jointly by the CAF Department of Governance and Technical Cooperation and the Cambridge International Consulting firm, in three key areas for achieving its objectives: negotiation, strategic communication, and leadership and persuasion, which are pillars of the capacity of the actors to exert a strategic influence through their work as leaders of society, reducing levels of confrontation and building consensus on the different views that each sector contributes to national life.

In the area of negotiation, the program uses the basic model developed by Harvard University. This is a practical model of proven effectiveness which has been used internationally, especially in Latin America. The leadership model is derived from new developments that deal directly with new challenges where democratic participation is an urgent need. Since these processes take place between persons and institutions, strategic communication is a critical area, and the program presents new and practical tools to improve the efficiency of communication.

Cambridge International Consulting has focused its research and practice on the generation of influence and strategic power. The firm is formed by well-known professionals from Latin America who are familiar with the regional situation and have used similar processes in very varied contexts of public interest.

The program is integrated into CAF’s field of action of governance and is supplemented by other programs being executed in the region, which provide training, technical assistance, and orientation for leaders and their teams in national and municipal governments.

The Corporation has formed strategic associations with prestigious international institutions such as George Washington University with the Governance and Democratic Sustainability Program; the Organization of American States through the Inter-American Agency for Cooperation and Development (IACD) with the Integrated Program for Municipal Development in the Andean Region; Cambridge International Consulting (CIC) with the Tools for Governance and Consensus Building Program; and the IDEA Foundation of Bolivia with the Leadership Program for Transformation.