By Dipo Olowookere
On Monday, the Ivoirian government, through the Ministry of Planning and Development (MPD) and the Sub-Regional Office for West Africa of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), launched the support project to strengthen development planning in Côte d’Ivoire.
This project forms part of the fundamental mission of the ECA to provide assistance to African countries and aims at supporting the renewal of development planning in Côte d’Ivoire.
It consists of developing a Guide to the Project Cycle (GPC) and of strengthening the capacities of the Ivoirian public sector executives in project monitoring and evaluation.
The GPC refers to a set of tools for project design and management based on the Logical Framework analytical method. It takes into account the activity of management and decision-making during the project cycle (including the missions, roles and responsibilities, key documents and decision choices).
The support of the ECA will make it possible to assess the use of GPC tools in Côte d’Ivoire and to provide a methodological guide that presents the different stages of the project cycle, as well as the missions, roles and responsibilities of the actors.
As for the capacity strengthening workshop, it will be held in Abidjan on February 21-25, 2017 with the objective of improving technical skills in project monitoring and evaluation for the management of the MPD and of other Ministries in charge of the design and implementation of development programmes and projects.
For the Deputy Cabinet Director of the Ministry of Planning and Development, Mr N’Grouma Tanoh, it is important to have a guide to the management cycle of the priority projects in Côte d’Ivoire in order on one hand, to standardise management methods and procedures applicable by all the sectoral ministries and on the other hand, to improve the absorption capacities of credits allocated to projects.
For the Director of the Sub-Regional Office for West Africa of the ECA, Dr. Dimitri Sanga, the launching of this project aligns perfectly with the mandate of his organisation which consists of supporting the economic and social development of Member States, to encourage regional integration and promote international cooperation for the development of Africa.
Taking into consideration the sub-regional context, marked by a relatively low resilience to exogenous shocks, with the loss of nearly 3 percentage points of growth between 2014 and 2015, owing mainly to the effect of lower prices for raw materials, Dr Dimitri Sanga explained that the ECA places a special emphasis on two fundamental levers that are closely associated: the acceleration in the structural transformation of African economies and the strengthening of development planning.
Lastly, the Director of the Sub-Regional Office for West Africa of the ECA congratulated Côte d’Ivoire which, with the implementation of the second generation of its NDP for 2016-2020, “is one of the rare countries of our sub-region and even of Africa to remain in an effective and continual process of development planning since 2012”.
Côte d’Ivoire, it should be remembered, implemented successive five-year plans from its independence in 1960 up to 1985, followed by structural adjustment plans and poverty reduction strategy papers up to 2012. In order to transform Côte d’Ivoire into an emergent country by 2020, the Government has decided to re-position planning at the heart of public action. This commitment was materialised by the development and implementation of the National Development Plan (NDP for 2012-2015) and the adoption in December 2015 of the second generation of the NDP for 2016-2020, which is the new framework of reference currently being implemented.
Adedapo Adesanya