MANY of the Local Government Authorities (LGAs) lag behind in social and economic development due to a number of factors, including lack of strategic planning, which has been cited as a major impediment.
Last week, experts from the Economic and
Social Research Foundation (ESRF) in collaboration with Mwanza Regional
Commissioner’s Office organized a special workshop which was meant to
sharpen skills of top officials from the three regions of the Lake Zone
on the importance of Strategic Planning in their areas of operations.
Since LGAs were legal entities of public
service delivery, they were in principle responsible for provision of
services such as health, water and sanitation, empowerment and many
others that need strategic planning as part of performance improvement
initiatives.
Historically, the planning and
implementation of LGAs activities are affected by decisions and planning
made at the central level of the government. However, of recent, the
government had adopted a number of transformation agendas which need to
be integrated into LGAs Strategic Planning processes.
Speaking as she gave the keynote speech,
the ESRF Executive Director Dr Tausi Kida said the series of the
workshops on the agenda for LGAs executives was of paramount importance
especially now when the government implements crucial programs targeting
to boost economic status of the country.
“These workshops are the continuation of
the country wide capacity building programs as launched by the Ministry
of Finance under its Poverty Reduction Department last year, to expose
LGAs to techniques and procedures for undertaking their strategic
planning, budgeting, and reporting taking into account the recently
adopted National Planning Frameworks,” she said.
According to Dr Kida, lack of required
strategic planning approaches was likely to cause serious effect to the
implementation and proper adoption of development agendas mentioning
them as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Africa Development
Agenda 2063, and the second Five Year Development Plan (FYDP II
2015/16-2020/21).
Experience has shown serious gaps in
applying strategic planning during execution of various development
programs in many LGAs, she said, challenging the workshop participants
who included the Regional Administrative Secretaries (RASs) District
Executive Directors (DEDs) and Planning Officers from Mwanza, Mara and
Simiyu regions to work of the gained materials and empower their
subordinates accordingly.
They were initially introduced on the
main topics that included situation analysis, strategic plans,
budgeting, operational planning, implementation, monitoring and
evaluation and reporting which an important aspects since it involved
communicating results to the management so that action could be taken to
direction adjustment and performance improvement.
It was revealed that government
institutions in the country, have been reporting on their performance in
compliance with statutory requirements but their reports tend to focus
on implementation progress main on physical implementation of activities
and expenditures rather than higher level results.
The workshop was further informed that
in order to improve the scope and quality of the reports and to better
link reports to Strategic Plans and FYDP II, the government
institutions, starting 2017/2018 will be required to report in more
detail, on the performance against plans.
“In the process of reporting results,
the Monitoring and Evaluation techniques outlined in this workshop will
be needed to collect, manage, analyze, and interpret data. For this to
happen, government institutions monitoring and evaluation sections and
professionals will need to be capacitated by management in terms of
crucial areas,” read the paper in part.
Capacity building for proper monitoring
and evaluation will include adequate number of M&E professionals,
relevant skills, financial resources and modern equipment for data
collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination. Mwanza Regional
Commissioner (RC) Mr John Mongela said as he opened the workshop that
the materials on the subject were timely amid researches showing a
number of challenges in the implementation of the Millennium Development
Goals (MGDs) last 15 years.
One of the challenges according to the
RC was the fact that the implementation of MDGs did not reach to the
grassroots levels of the country’s governance machinery particularly in
the LGAs.
“It is due to this understanding that
the LGAs breathed a sigh of relief seeing stakeholders like ESRF opting
to work on the indentified challenges and make sure the snags noted in
the implementation of MDGs are not repeated this time,” he said.
Mr Mongela though, said it was high time
other development stakeholders, scholars and research institutions
chipped in by conducting such knowledge sharing seminars and workshop to
bring more awareness and understanding to a wider segment of the public
and members in the civil service.
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