Putting the citizen at the heart of sustainable and inclusive development through collaborative State-CTD-Community governance.
This is the primary objective of PROLOG (Projet Gouvernance Locale et Communautés Résilientes - Local Governance and Resilient Communities Project), whose official launch ceremony took place in Yaoundé on Friday May 10, 2024 by Georges Elanga Obam, Minister of Decentralization and Local Development, in the presence of Nicolas Perrin, Head of World Bank Business Operations in Cameroon.
In his launch speech, the Minister explained that "the aim of the project is to increase community access to infrastructure that is resilient to climate change, and to build local capacity to manage resources and deliver services effectively. It is based on three main pillars: firstly, the completion of all the reforms linked to the decentralization and local development policy, with the continuation of the reform of the CTD's human resources, particularly the establishment of the local civil service, and the finalization of the regulations aimed at improving local authority finances, with an emphasis on local taxation and the transfer of financial resources, and the regulations on the evaluation and transfer of competencies. Secondly, to strengthen the technical, human and financial capacities of local authorities, with a view to improving governance and the delivery of public services. A specific subsidy instrument will be used to encourage local authorities to improve their performance through the purchase of related indicators.Thirdly, it will focus on providing people with the infrastructure they need to ensure their well-being, and to make them resilient to climate change. This will be achieved through the construction of community and inter-communal infrastructures. This will be achieved by strengthening citizen participation through the establishment of frameworks for dialogue and collaboration between the CTDs and neighborhood and village committees. The PROLOG project was created by Prime Ministerial decree on January 25, 2024, is scheduled to run for 5 years, and will be deployed in six regions: Adamaoua, North, Far North, North-West, South-West and East. For Nicolas Perrin, Head of the Global Pole of Expertise in Social Development for West and Central Africa, this is proof of the vitality of the relationship between the institution he represents and Cameroon.
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Thierry Hervé Jackson Ngwa Edielle, PROLOG 's coordinator
« The aim is to change mentalities, as they are strongly focused on centralized decision-making, with projects defined by the central government and made available to communities. Here, we're going to have to work with the communities themselves, and you're well aware of the decree that Minddevel has issued to define how neighborhood and village committees are to be set up. So the project will work with these various committees to identify the needs of the communities, and once these needs have been identified, agreements will be signed between the project (Prolog) and the corresponding authorities, either the commune or the regional council, so that in the end the service will be provided at grassroots level. For all this to be possible, we need to strengthen the capacities not only of the State itself, which must provide advisory support to the local authorities, but also of the local authority staff who will be in charge of implementing the project. ».
Georges Elanga Obam, Minddevel
«Prolog, an initiative of the government and the World Bank, is a project that enables public authorities to provide decentralized local authorities and administrations with resources made available by the World Bank, with a view to giving them the capacity to respond to the concerns of populations in a particular context. Where there is a crisis, where there are displaced people. It's also about giving them the capacity to build infrastructures that are resilient to the climate changes we've been observing ever since. It's about ensuring that we promote gender, women and girls, and disadvantaged populations. It's all of these communities that we want to take charge of, so that in the long term, the solutions that are found not only contribute to development at local level, but also help to resolve the crises we're seeing in our country. If we have worked well over the next 5 years, with an endowment of nearly 190 billion CFA francs, we should see crises resolved, development progress and our administrations equipped to support the CTDs.».
Clément Noumsi
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