UN-HABITAT Expert Working Group Meeting on Participatory Budgeting

MDP-ESA participated in the Expert Group Meeting on participatory budgeting organized by UN-Habitat from 22nd to 25th November 2005. The participants comprised of local government practitioners, local government associations, municipal reform programmes, academic and training institutions and civic organizations. The meeting which was held in Gigiri, Nairobi attracted 25 participants. They were from Ecuador, Benin, Cameroun, Eritrea, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The objectives of the meeting, whose theme was Towards the Design of a Training Companion for Sub-Saharan Africa, were to:

• Review capacity building needs for initiating processes of participatory budgeting in the Sub-Saharan Africa region;

• Reach an agreement on the content and format of a training companion for enhancing the practice of participatory budgeting in the Sub-Saharan Africa region; and

• Elaborate a roadmap for the development and dissemination of this training companion.

At the meeting the UN-Habitat familiarized participants with its toolkits on participatory budgeting and linked them to the Global Campaign on Urban Governance. This was followed by Case studies presented by MDPESA, 'ENDA (Senegal) and CIGU (Ecuador). Participants at the meeting were also allowed to identify capacity building needs in the area of participatory budgeting and to map the way forward in preparing a training companion on participatory budgeting.