The train-the-trainers model is an educational framework designed to turn trainees into expert trainers themselves, equipped to pass on knowledge or skills they’ve acquired to subsequent learners in their communities. The World War II era has been credited with institutionalizing and popularizing the approach when it was used to quickly mobilize a mostly new industrial workforce. The exponential nature of the model’s reach had an obvious appeal to the social sector. When the problems at hand are often so great, direct service delivery can never catch up to ever-growing needs. In those cases, local capacity building and a train-the-trainers model offers a promising path to close gaps in access to health, education, and other necessary social benefits. For instance, in the field of global surgery, where we work, the gap in access to surgical care is astronomical, with five billion people lacking access to safe, affordable, and timely surgery. The problem is simply too large to ever solve one surgery at a time.

Despite train-the-trainers models becoming more and more common, a pressing issue remains: How do we measure the impact of training? This question becomes even more critical across sectors where the training requires education beyond online learning to specialized training that necessitates hands-on learning from an expert. For example, for surgeons, astronauts, pilots, chefs, tailors, and many other fields, theoretical lectures are critical to their learning, yet hands-on time is essential to the mastery of their craft. Just as we may never forget who taught us to tie our shoes or ride a bike for the first time, many surgeons will always remember the trainer who taught them how to gracefully tie her first suture. How can we begin to quantify that type of impact? And, by extension, how do we demonstrate to funders that these programs are worth the investment?

At our organization, ReSurge International, a global health nonprofit with a mission to build reconstructive surgical capacity in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), our evolution has taught us about the transformative impact of training. During the 1990s, we initiated a shift from the then-standard medical-mission fly-in approach to a more sustainable model centered on training local health care professionals and capacity building. Many across the nonprofit sector have made similar investments in the train-the-trainers approach, intuitively knowing that this model will have a more profound impact than one-off service delivery models. The impact of that shift has been profound at ReSurge. For instance, in Nepal, we trained the first-ever reconstructive surgeon in the country who has now gone on to establish a hospital dedicated to burns and reconstructive surgery. Kirtipur Hospital in Kathmandu now boasts fourteen full-time specialist plastic and reconstructive surgeons with six operating rooms, and a full-time residency and specialty fellowship programs, also hosting multiple international trainees. Just last year, the team performed over 1,200 plastic and reconstructive surgery procedures, admitted close to 800 acute burn patients, and treated patients from 75 out of the 77 periphery districts across Nepal. The reach of training a leading local surgeon who can go on to train others far outweighs the impact of paying for only one surgery at a time.

Read the full article about train the trainers model for nonprofits by Natalie Meyers and Anna Santos at Stanford Social Innovation Review.