USAID/ Tatweer and the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office for Services held the first of three jointly-sponsored conferences on capacity development and provincial service delivery improvement. The opening conference of May 2009 focused on the provinces around the center and west of the country—Babil, Karbala, Najaf, Wassit, Anbar and Diyala. The next conference in the series will be held in the city of Tikrit and will address the service delivery issues for the northern provinces, including the Kurdistan Region, as well as Salahadin (Tikrit), Ninewa (Mosul) and oil-rich Kirkuk. The third conference is schedule to be held for the south, in Basra.
This was one of the largest such gatherings yet held in Baghdad, with over 500 participants including over 50 cabinet ministers and provincial governors and over 150 provincial directors from service ministries. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and USAID Director Christopher Crowley represented the American Government. Deputy Prime Minister for Services, Dr. Rafe H. Al-Eissawi, presided over the conference.
This conference powerfully stressed and reinforced the practical and budgetary linkages between the central organs of government coordination and the provincial level directorates directly responsible for providing services to the people. In this time of transition to increasingly decentralized processes and responsibilities, the conference, broadcast live on Iraqi television, stressed frank and transparent addresses and discussions of how to assure that provincial offices have the capacity and resources to effectively deliver on their mandated functions.
For the USAID/ Tatweer National Capacity Development program, the conference provided the public endorsement and cooperation from the highest government authorities for the new USAID/ Tatweer initiative to reach out and help the most important service delivery ministries improve their administrative capacity in the provinces, and the communication and budget planning processes between the center and the provinces. Small group meetings between USAID/ Tatweer public administration experts in such fields as civil service development, human resources, fiscal management, project management, leadership, and IT management filled the first day, bringing the 150 provincial officials head to head, in Arabic language discussions with the international technical advisors.
“This conference unites ministerial and provincial officials with the newly-elected governors to discuss openly, and agree on solutions to improve services and capacity building in our central region provinces,” said Dr. Al-Eissawi. “It was an unprecedented event for Iraq made possible by the close cooperation between our Government and the USAID/Tatweer National Capacity Development Program, which we wish to see extended to cover all of Iraq’s provinces.”
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Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dr. Rafe H. Al-Eissawi, at the USAID/Tatweer Conference
“It was an unprecedented event for Iraq made possible by the close cooperation between our Government and the USAID/Tatweer…”
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