As part of its long-term efforts to promote Green Productivity (GP) practices in member countries, the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) recently concluded a four-day e-learning course at its videoconferencing (VC) facility at the Secretariat in Tokyo. It provided basic knowledge of GP methods, techniques, and tools, while preparing participants for a subsequent training-of-trainers project on the topic.

The e-learning course was conducted in two sessions coordinated by NPOs in each country: 7–10 November 2017 for Cambodia, Fiji, and Vietnam; and 13–16 November for Bangladesh, India, IR Iran, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It attracted 235 participants from the 10 countries. The sessions were conducted by APO resource persons from Singapore and Malaysia.

GP is a strategy for simultaneously enhancing productivity and environmental performance for overall socioeconomic development, which leads to sustained improvement in the quality of life. It involves the combined application of appropriate productivity and environmental management tools, techniques, and technologies to reduce the environmental impact of an organization’s activities, products, and services while enhancing profitability and competitive advantage.

The APO has been in the forefront in promoting this strategy in member countries through various modalities including face-to-face training courses, demonstration projects, and self-e-learning and VC-based courses. The most recent course included presentations and lectures by APO experts and facility visits by participants in their own countries to observe GP practices in real-life situations and make suggestions for additional improvements. It covered basics like concepts and methodologies of GP, related tools and techniques, and case studies of GP initiatives.

The resource persons and case studies helped participants understand how they could sustain GP implementation and integrate it with other productivity improvement initiatives and best practices.

During the opening session, APO Industry Department Director Hikaru Horiguchi reiterated the importance of the most qualified participants attending APO face-to-face projects and noted that VC-based courses had proven to be an excellent platform for identifying those candidates. He urged NPOs to nominate the most outstanding VC course enrollees for future traditional projects offered by the APO.