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Home arrow News arrow Transparency in Land Administration (TLA) training in Francophone Africa

May 21st, 2012

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Transparency in Land Administration (TLA) training in Francophone Africa
training_in_francophone.jpgThe fourth and final edition of Transparency in Land Administration (TLA) training has been successfully executed in M’bour, Senegal from 9-11 September 2008.   The training is a joint initiative of Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) / Training and Capacity Building Branch (TCBB) of UN-HABITAT and International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC). The recent event in Senegal was implemented in cooperation with ENDA Ecopop of Senegal, which is a part of Enda Tiers Monde, an international non-governmental organization.

The training attracted 28 participants from 5 Francophone countries: Benin (6), Burkina Faso (7), Chad (4), DRC (4) and Senegal (7). Training participants represented a wide range of professional groups / organizations: central government (6), local authorities (3), customary chiefs (2), civil society organizations (4), professional association (1), academia (7) and media (5). Further, 11 of the participants were women. But, this number belies the real representation of women’s concerns which were more vocally and convincingly expressed both during breakout group and plenary sessions.

Mr. Pape Mor Ndiaye, Director of Decentralization, Ministry of Decentralization and Local Government Authorities of Senegal officially launched the training with a keynote address. A substantive presentation that followed the opening session anchored the training agenda in generic land governance and transparency concepts. This paved the way for the introduction of tools which have always been the centerpiece of the program. The tools were presented in simple and user friendly – ‘how to’- format: how to assess the level and nature of land corruption; how to improve information and public participation; how to enhance ethics and professionalism; how to reform institutions and organizations. The skills and knowledge aspect of the training has always been premised on sharing these tools which are meant to improve transparency in land administration and / or prevent and cure land corruption. Exercises on the relevance and utility of the tools were provided using real life regional case studies obtained from Benin, Burkina Faso, and Senegal. As always, the training concluded with event evaluation and the award of certificates of participation.

A shorter version of the training will feature as one of the 23 training events of World Urban Forum IV (WUF IV). Further, training toolkit and trainers’ guide development which are the final outputs of the program at this stage are expected to be made available at the end of the year and these should provide valuable resources that would promote sustainability of the initiative. With these resources, stakeholders interested in running the training at local, national and regional level will be able to do so without waiting for expert inputs currently coming from institutions that have partnered to execute the training.
On the margins of the training, leading partners of the TLA initiative, GLTN / TCBB and ITC held meetings and discussed pertinent issues related to post training support (as a strategy to sustain gains of the initiative) and ways and means of further scaling-up the Sub-Saharan Africa experience, i.e. taking the training outside Africa. After additional consultations and depending on the availability of budget, regional partners and demand for the training, these may as well constitute elements of forthcoming activities.

With the implementation of the Francophone edition of the training, partners involved in designing and implementing the training have completed second phase activities and in doing so reached an important milestone. The training program that entailed running four successive events in four different regions of Africa has up until now trained 114 change agents (73 men and 41 women). This has been made possible by generous financial support GLTN received from Swedish and Norwegian governments.