Mongolia RPCV Layton Croft
Biography: Layton Croft
Career Overview:
Layton Croft is a journalist, educator, and international development consultant with a specialty in rural information and media networks. He is originally from the United States and was trained as a journalist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and earned an MAT in language teaching from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. He spent three years in Mongolia as a Peace Corps Volunteer, where he gained experience in curriculum design, national education policy, distance learning design and implementation, and NGO and community development. He spent a year teaching journalism and critical thinking in a Korean university, and then three more years back in Mongolia as Program Director for Information Systems for a five-year rural economic development project. He designed a participatory information systems appraisal model that created a platform for the establishment of regional and national media networks. Individual and organizational members of these networks specialize in producing and disseminating information for a fee, strategic knowledge management and sharing, and ongoing and integrated professional skills development. He worked to create Mongolia's largest rural business news and information magazine and radio network (www.rbn.mn), and the country's first market price commodity information service. Both of these initiatives were spun-off from a foreign donor-funded project into independent, revenue-generating entities. He was an ICT Stories Contest finalist in 2000 and a winner in 2001. In addition to presenting his winning story at the 2001 INET Summit in Stockholm, he also won that year's INET Slam session contest with a proposal for a customized information service targeting nomadic Mongolian herders.
Employment:
2002-present Freelance writer/international development consultant
1999-2002 Program Director for Information Systems, Gobi Regional Economic Growth Initiative/Mongolia, Pact/Mercy Corps/USAID
1998 Visiting Professor, Cheju National University, Korea
1994-1997 Peace Corps Volunteer and Volunteer Coordinator, Mongolia
Recent and Current Consultancy Projects:
· Judicial Reform Project, Pact/National Center for State Courts/USAID, public education campaign in Mongolia
· Gobi Regional Economic Growth Initiative, Pact/Mercy Corps/USAID, journalism training in Mongolia
· Mercy Corps, qualitative project evaluation story writing initiative in Serbia, Georgia