Yaounde, 3 August 2021 (ECA) – Twenty Cameroonian civil servants drawn from a wide range of ministries have affirmed their commitment to fully appropriate the Integrated Planning and Reporting Toolkit (IPRT), developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), to help the country systematically implement its 2030 national development strategy.
This follows a four-day training on the IPRT which rounded off in Yaoundé, Thursday 29 July 2021.
IPRT is a web-based application developed in response to the needs for African countries to simultaneously adopt and domesticate both the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 into their national development plans and enable them to report their progress in a harmonized way.
“This tool comes at a time when the Monitoring and Evaluation Committee of Cameroon’s 2030 National Development Strategy (SND2030) is being constituted,” affirmed Mr. Eone Laurent of the Directorate General of Planning in the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development (MINEPAT).
“We, who have been trained, constitute a pool of trainers who will share information on the use of the IPRT to members of this Committee and beyond for an easier and better monitoring of the implementation of our country’s SND2030,” he went on.
“I applaud ECA for choosing Cameroon as the second African country to be provided with the fully in-person IPRT training program this year. Applying the IPRT will help my ministry to reshape its own development goals and targets while monitoring and evaluating progress in the telecommunications sector” said Ms. Gha Eleanor Funkuin, a senior official in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
“The IPRT workshop has underscored the need for a logical framework for the SND30,” pointed out Mr. Tiobo'o Papou Cédric Edmond, Statistician at the National Institute of Statistics (INS) of Cameroon and member of the technical team in charge of drawing up the country's National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (SNDS).
“Beyond the issue of aligning our programs with Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2063 (A2063), there is this good practice of monitoring and evaluation that we will have to integrate,” he added.
Ms. Ayoung Marceline Michèle Grace, researcher at the University of Yaoundé I noted that “this training has provided me with a more practical understanding of the concepts of ‘goals’, ‘targets’ and ‘indictors’ and on exactly how to deploy them in the planning and implementation of development programs.”
Mr. Nguetse De-Joubert, a Senior planning official of Cameroon’s Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development who opened the training saluted ECA’s effort aimed at consistently driving the structural transformation agenda which Cameroon has fully integrated as one of its development planning pillars.
His colleague – Mr. Théophile Saidou Hamadou, who closed the workshop, urged the participants to deepen their understanding of the IPRT toolkit and use the acquired knowledge to leverage Cameroon’s 2030 National Development Strategy (SND30).
“You are now equipped to take into account the United Nations SDGs and the African Union's Agenda 2063 in the development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of our national development plans as well as in the formulation of evidence-based policies” Mr. Saidou Hamadou reminded the trainees.
“The future is more important than the past in terms of shaping inclusive and sustainable development trajectories and IPRT can help Cameroon build its future through integrated development planning,” declared Mr. Tadele Ferede Agaje who led the training on behalf of ECA. He assured the Cameroonian officials of ECA’s continuous support to help them master and effectively domesticate the IPRT toolkit.
Meanwhile on behalf of Mr. Antonio Pedro, Director of ECA’s Subregional Office for Central Africa (ECA/SRO-CA), Mr. Jean Luc Mastaki who heads the Economic Diversification and Policy Reforms Section of the Office reiterated ECA’s commitment to work closely with Cameroon, especially through MINEPAT, in order to strengthen the country’s development planning system and reinforce the SND2030 implementation process as ECA strives to place development planning at the heart of the structural transformation and economic diversification process.
During a debriefing meeting with the training team, Mr. Antonio Pedro, ECA/SRO-CA’s Director, underscored the relevance and timeliness of the training, as it would help refine results of the SND2030 framework and align it with the SDGs and Agenda 2063. He also emphasized the need for continuous support and advocacy in the use of the toolkit in other Central African countries.
While identifying new pathways and defining a way forward to the training, Mr Pedro underscored the need for a unified approach in forging the IPRT domestication in Cameroon through better coordination with the UN Country Team (UNCT) and its SDGs Group.
He highlighted opportunities related to domesticating the toolkit at subnational levels to support the decentralization process and linking it with the ECA’s GIS-enabled spatial planning, decision making and investment tools on development hotspots to reinforce planning and policy coherence at local level. He encouraged linking IPRT with the Integrated National Financing Framework (INFF) as an opportunity to better align resources to development priorities.
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