Local governance resilient communities project gets over 189 BFCFA gov´t push.

This is thanks to the signing by President Biya, of a decree authorising the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, MINEPAT, Alamine Ousmane Mey, to sign for and collect an external loan.

President Biya, as per decree no. 2023/359 of 22 August 2023, specified that he had authorised the MINEPAT boss to sign with the International Development Association, IDA, a loan agreement to the tune of 300 million United States Dollars, USD; which is approximately 189.2 billion FCFA for the financing of local governance and resilient communities project.

The objective of the project is to increase community access to climate resilient infrastructure and strengthen local capacity to manage resources and deliver quality, long lasting and grassroots transformative ventures.

The local governance and resilient communities project has four components. The first aims at improving and upgrading community infrastructures and basic services delivery; foster the implementation of activities to support community-led development with an emphasis on the most marginalised and vulnerable communities in conflict-affected and socioeconomically disadvantaged municipalities amongst regions of Far North, North, Adamawa, East, South West and North West.

The second component focuses on improving multi-level governance framework and the capacity of decentralized entities to deliver services. Therefore, the component will provide technical assistance to central and local entities to further operationalise the decentralisation agenda at the institutional and policy levels; build and strengthen the capacity of the decentralized local authorities to manage resources and to exercise their competencies more effectively and in a participatory and inclusive manner.

Even more, this component incorporates knowledge management which will support the periodic assessment of lessons learned during project implementation.

This will ease future achievement of project objectives; guarantee suitability of implementing modalities; as well as guarantee adequacy and impact of the project interventions.

Also, it will ensure appropriate and reliable data collection and utilisation; streamline operation of implementing partners; and ensure effective coordination among stakeholders.

This component will identify implementation obstacles; take stock of emerging conflicts; document lessons learned so that they could be applied to introduce improvements to project implementation. 

The last but not the least of the four components of the local governance and resilient communities project tackles contingent emergency response. This is to make sure that the system can be triggered in the event of a man-made crisis, public health crisis, or natural disaster, through formal declaration of a national emergency, or upon a formal request from project managers.

It is worth recalling that on the same day, President Biya also signed another decree, number 2023/358 authorising Minister Alamine to take another loan. This time to the tune of 11,940,827 Euros; which is approximately 7,832,734,827 FCFA.

The President specified that MINEPAT sign with the Standard Chartered Bank of London, loan agreement, which funds will be used to finance the construction of the Ebolowa-Akom II-Kribi road.