Centre for Rural Development (SLE)

 






 
SLE has been offering practice-oriented vocational education and training for future experts and managers in the field of international cooperation and development cooperation since 1962. Our courses range from Postgraduate Studies to Training Courses for international experts in Berlin to practice-oriented research and Consultancy for Organizations and Universities active in the field of development cooperation.

Our fifty years of experience and our links with the Humboldt University Berlin guarantee academically sound concepts and methods, analysis based on empirical evidence, and practical tools and consultancy products.

In the course of Training (SLE POSTGRADUATE STUDIES), which has always been at the heart of SLE, a broad spectrum of development policy issues will be discussed. Development theory and development policy, cooperation with fragile states, sustainable emergency aid, and development strategies against a background of economic and environmental global crises are some examples (Teaching Programme).

Since poverty issues, notably in the rural areas of developing and emerging countries, remain unsolved, SLE focuses on vocational training and Training for international experts (SLE TRAINING) in areas where it has tradition and outstanding expertise: rural development. Devlopment topics related to the socio-economic sciences and humanities are discussed with a multi-layered approach (from local to national level) that is both results-based and participatory. They are then systematically combined with planning and methodological expertise. International regimes have a growing influence on national and local developments and therefore likewise taken into account during training and determinants for success discussed. We give our participants a solid foundation in management skills, as well as those required for stress and conflict management. Other soft skills we impart often determine the quality and effectiveness of participants’ subsequent performance in the development field and beyond.

In the course of its more than fifty-year existence SLE has accumulated core competencies, i.e., specialist expertise, particularly in the areas of rural development and cooperation with fragile states.

SLE carries out Research and Consultancy Projects in these areas (SLE RESEARCH & CONSULTANCY), which are jointly implemented as overseas projects by the participants of the postgraduate course programme or tailored to the needs of the commissioning organization.