National Social Marketing Centre

Steve Menzies and I  are just back from our first visit to Jordan on our ECODIT/USAID contract which aims to develop a 6 month's social marketing training programme for NGO's working in the water, energy and solid waste sectors.  The purpose of the visit was to orientate ourselves to the needs of the NGO sector in Jordan and talk to the people we will be training in September.  The NSMC prides itself on making sure all of our training courses are tailor made to the needs of our clients.  We just don't have "off the shelf" training products that get rolled out across the World.

During our busy schedule which sometimes amounted to over 7 meetings per day we were able to talk people who were undertaking ground breaking behavioural change work in the environmental, health and financial sectors.  We hope to use as many local examples of behaviour change work undertaken to tackle the very serious challenges facing Jordan.  Many people may not be aware that most households in the country only have access to water from the mains 1 day per week - having to store the water for the other 6 days in large tanks.  Virtually all energy has to be imported into the country and with prices going up all the time, there are real political issues in terms of access and equity to these scarce resources across all communities in Jordan.

Our next visit will see the beginning of our training programme where we are hoping to develop the skills of over thirty individuals and 5 organisations to a point so that they can access over $160,000 of development aid to implement their own behaviour change strategies over the next 12 months.  We will keep you posted on progress.

The Dead Sea below drops 1 metre per year  - the mighty Jordan River that fed this salty sea is now just a trickle because of demand from industry, agriculture and increased population in the region.