Development Account Projects
Enhancing the contribution of local authorities and their partners towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals through building the capacity of local government training institutes
Background:
Achieving the Millennium Development Goals is possible only if subnational actors, close to the target groups, are empowered to work towards poverty eradication and sustainable development. Given that decentralization and the devolution of power to local governments is a reality in most countries, it is this sphere of government which needs to redouble its efforts.
However, many local governments lack the resources to govern as effectively as would be required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals locally. United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) has identified national local government training institutes as potential key players in providing needs-based training for locally elected leaders and municipal managers in order to capacitate them to respond to the many challenges they face. Unfortunately, in most countries such training institutes are underfunded and their staff lack capacities to address the changing realities of local governments.
This proposal aims at strengthening local government training institutes in two interrelated ways: strengthening their institutional capacities and building the training skills of their faculty. An expert group meeting would be called to assess the needs of the training institutes. Subregional training of trainers workshops would thematically focus on leadership skills for councillors, transparency, financial management, participatory budgeting, local economic development as well as gender and local governance. In all these areas, UN-Habitat methodologies and tools exist. Tools for institutional strengthening would also be introduced in the subregional workshops (development of business plans, training needs and impact assessment) and would be followed up through regional partnering between institutions, newsletters, a website and selected advisory services.
The ongoing partnership with UNDP on governance, transparency and e-Learning in local governance will be utilized for the respective training modules. The ILO will continue to partner with UN-Habitat on local economic development. It is further planned to strengthen the established contacts with UNIFEM with regard to gender in urban government training, in particular, gender-responsive budget initiatives.
Objective:
To enhance the contribution and role of local authorities and their partners in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, in particular in addressing poverty, gender inequity and equality and in the realization of improved local governance and sustainable development by strengthening the capacities of local government training institutes.
Expected accomplishments:
- Strengthened national local government training institutions and international local government training networks to effectively respond to the training needs of local authorities
- Increased training skills and expanded training curricula of local government trainers
Implementation status:
Project implementation commenced in 2010.
