Welcome statement
Welcoming the participants, N.B. Khadka, Acting Executive Director, Local Development Training Academy (LDTA), Nepal, said the meeting provided an opportunity to make a valuable contribution to the strengthening of the decentralization process in South Asia.
Mazu Tsurumi, FAO Representative, Nepal, expressed thanks to the South Asian country delegates for their participation in the workshop. The issues to be taken up by the workshop are closely related to the achievement of FAO’s goals and priorities, he said.
Inaugural address
In his inaugural address, H.E. Kamal Thapa, Minister for Local Development, Government of the Kingdom of Nepal, said that the workshop theme was very important and timely. The key issue facing governments in the region is ensuring sustainability of development while meeting the aspirations of the masses. The answer lies in decentralization, the minister said.
In Nepal, 4 000 VDCs (village development committees) and 75 DDCs (district development committees) have taken decision-making closer to the people. The government was now transferring the management of primary schools and primary health units to local communities and had already found sufficient improvement in the management of these institutions. A committee had been set up to identify capacity-building needs to strengthen financial autonomy of local government institutions, Mr Thapa said.
The government realised that poverty reduction programmes could not be effective without building capacity of the rural poor for resource management, planning, implementation and monitoring of development programmes and projects. He expressed his best wishes to the workshop.
Outline of objectives and expected outputs
Wim Polman, Rural Development Officer of the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, outlined the objectives and expected outputs of the workshop. The workshop provided a unique opportunity for discussing how decentralization can work for poverty and hunger reduction in the region and should focus on strategies to achieve the FAO World Food Summit (WFS) and United Nations Millennium Develpoment (MD) goal to reduce poverty and hunger by half by the year 2015. This would enable identification of priority areas for support to capacity-building of stakeholders and coalition-building, through bilateral and multilateral cooperation. CIRDAP and LDTA provide a platform to facilitate future work on this topic, he said.
He emphasised the need for reorienting government line ministries to bring decentralization issues to the fore and link these with the objectives for hunger reduction and sustainable agricultural development.
Keynote address
In his keynote address, Mya Maung, Director General, CIRDAP spoke about the Centre’s close collaboration with the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific for awareness and capacity-building on decentralization issues and the FAO/MD goals for hunger and poverty reduction in the region. CIRDAP-FAO workshops on the topic have been held in India to develop A handbook for trainers on participatory local development for India’s three million elected village councilors, a third of them women, and local government officials.
According to World Bank estimates, South Asia is home to 40 percent of the 1.3 billion poor people in the world. While a number of targeted programmes for livelihood and income generation have been implemented in the region, the achievements have been limited, highlighting the need for participatory approaches involving the poor. In this context, human resource development and capacity-building of people’s organizations and local governments have become essential
In Sri Lanka, decentralization towards subregional levels and local participation in planning and development interventions have significantly enriched social development programmes, he pointed out. More than 80 percent of the country’s population has adequate access to basic sanitation, compared to 53 percent in Bangladesh, 31 percent in India, 27 percent in Nepal and 61 percent in Pakistan. Sri Lanka also has the lowest infant mortality rate of 20 per thousand live births against 68 in Bangladesh, 66 in India, 72 in Nepal and 85 in Pakistan.
The crucial issues in the decentralization process in South Asia are a) local resource mobilization by local governments, private and civil society organizations, and b) capacity-building for effective participatory planning, promotion of employment and income generation activities by local governments.
Address by the chairperson
Khem Raj Nepal, Secretary, Ministry of Local Development, Government of Nepal, said devolution in his country had been implemented in the basic health, basic education, agriculture extension and rural infrastructure sectors. Nepal’s positive political commitment to decentralization was supported, among others, by the provision in the Local Self-Government Act of the Decentralization Implementation Monitoring Committee chaired by the Prime Minister; proactive policies on decentralization in the Tenth Plan which include finalization of a road map for fiscal decentralization and preparation of the Local Bodies Service Commission. The recent decision on revenue sharing would enhance the financial capability of the local bodies in the country.
Vote of thanks
B. Sudhakar Rao, Head,Training, CIRDAP, proposed a vote of thanks at the end of the inaugural session.
