The IDC Concept

The International Development Courses (IDCs) are currently run in Oxford, Cardiff and Cambridge. They are courses organised for students by students with the aim of promoting and furthering development awareness in universities. Each university has their own independent committee organising the events and deciding strategy. But in addition, inter-university collaboration ensures that we create a brand and share resources that make the individual committee's work much easier.

Origins in Oxford

Oxford has a variety of different student development charities, many of whom send volunteers overseas to work on projects in developing communities. In the summer of 2006 representatives of many of these charities met to discuss international development, and how the charities could share ideas and work together to improve the sustainability of their overseas projects.

The IDC was a way of realising collaboration between groups - following from the success of similar events held at Cambridge, and with support from their committee, the first Oxford IDC was run on 10th February 2007. It's founding co-ordinator was Anna Lea, supported by members from Engineers without Borders, Oxford Development Abroad and Oxford Students Supporting Street Kids.

The Oxford IDC is now called the Oxford Forum for International
Development (OxFID).

Vision and Aims

Our vision is simple - to promote development awareness in universities.

It is our aim to create one day courses into which development professionals distil the crucial issues people should be aware of to be a global citizen and, especially, before participating in development interventions themselves.

In order to achieve this goal we have decided on five unifying principles:

• Introductory (i.e. not for professionals, dev.studies students etc.)
• Interdisciplinary (i.e. welcoming people from all academic backgrounds)
• Critical, questioning
• Advocating sustainability
• Focus on humanitarian development

This deliberately leaves a lot of freedom to the individual committees to shape their own course.

The aim of collaborating between universities is that we can share resources (websites, url, speaker database etc...) and create a brand that is well known across the UK and that attracts the most high profile speakers available.