Forty-five senior officials from the Bangladesh Civil Service graduated today from the first program hosted for Bangladesh by the Duke Center for International Development (DCID) at the Sanford School of Public Policy. Roy Kelly, professor of the practice of public policy at Sanford, led the two-week program on negotiation and capacity building.
During the graduation luncheon at the Washington Duke Inn, program graduate Ibraheem Khan, additional secretary of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Public Administration, thanked DCID faculty and staff for a successful program.
“We feel proud to be associated with this institution,” Khan said. “This program has heightened our confidence and has opened our eyes as well as our minds.”
Sanford’s Dean Kelly Brownell also thanked the program graduates for bringing their experience, insights and perspectives to Duke.
“Thank you for being our friends and colleagues now and in the future,” he said. “We hope we have given you something helpful that you can use in your professional work and we appreciate what you have given us.”
The program covered specialized topics such as budget negotiations, labor contracts, international security and cooperation, conflict resolution and public-private partnerships.
Faculty included Phyllis Pomerantz, Catherine Admay, Cory Krupp, Fernando Fernholz and Richard Hemming of DCID, as well as Bruce Jentleson and Billy Pizer of Sanford. Additional instructors included Paul Cramer, co-leader of the Accenture Negotiations Center of Excellence in Boston, and Andrew Sachs, coordinator of the Public Disputes Program at the Dispute Settlement Center in Carrboro, N.C.
Participants also visited several government and nonprofit offices, including the City of Durham’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center, and Durham-based human development organization FHI 360.
While this is DCID’s first program for Bangladesh at Duke University, the center led a program on fiscal decentralization in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2011 for officials from the country’s Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development.
