By Anayo Ezugwu

THE Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, through its Community Strategic Framework, CSF, (2016-2020) is to reduce poverty, strengthen political system and electioneering process in the region. Edward Singhatey, vice president, ECOWAS Commission, said the framework was designed to deepen economic integration, establish a monetary union and develop infrastructure in the sub-region.

At an interactive session of the West African Civil Society Forum, WACSOF, in Lagos, on Wednesday, September 27, Singhatey deplored extreme poverty, disease, criminality, terrorism, proliferation of small arms that have continued to define the structure of the region in the midst of abundance. He said if CSF is well implemented, it will make ECOWAS vision 2020 become a reality rather than a dream.

“The CSF has become the basis for the budgeting process of all ECOWAS institutions/agencies. I would therefore wish to mention that the budget of ECOWAS institutions follow a result based approach, where the expected results from the programmes and activities are clearly delineated. Resources are then allocated on the basis of these anticipated results. With this approach, the desired impact of our intervention will be clearly felt.

“Our commitment to making our work people based would have been realised. Gone are the days when ECOWAS institutions were concentrating on allocating to activities rather than results. However, let me assure you that I and my team are determined to leave behind a very strong institution. The ECOWAS institution reform programme has reached a very advanced stage. The reform programme is very far reaching, permeating every facet of our institution’s operations,” he said.

Khady Fall Tall, president, WACSOF, said the role of civil society is to interface with the people and report back to ECOWAS. She said the purpose of the meeting in Lagos was to harmonise some visions with ECOWAS and to learn about the new vision and CSF 2016-2020. According to her, all actions mentioned in the CSF will be analysed by the civil society who will take the outcome to their respective countries for implementations.

“But as you know the work for civil society is not only meeting, we need to implement programmes at the grassroots. This mandate is already done because the communities are represented by the civil society groups and other non-government actors. WACSOF is the umbrella for all civil society actors and what we need to do today is to examine what programmes we need to implement from now to 2020 with ECOWAS.

“But the role of ECOWAS is not to go to member states to implement its programmes. ECOWAS is office and the role for us is going with the idea, vision and priorities of ECOWAS. With this we can communicate, share and ask from the population what opinion they have regarding ECOWAS and we come back to ECOWAS  with the information.”

On his part, Essien Abel Essien, director, strategic planning, ECOWAS Commission, said the strategic planning is a cycle, where the commission plans, implements, reviews, get the feedback and feed it into its planning process again. He said the essence of the feedback is to understand what the commission has done well, what they have not done well and what programmes are most important to the communities because they can design programmes they don’t need.

“The strategic framework is a document that has been prepared by ECOWAS and we have estimated the total cost of implementing it annually but you know we can’t put figures in this programmes because of the financial situation of the countries. The CSF and its goals are very ambitious and we think that if they are well implemented in an orderly manner it is going to have a lot of impact on the communities.

“The monitoring process cannot take place if the civil society organisations don’t understand the framework or the programmes of ECOWAS. This annual interaction is to expose them to what ECOWAS is doing, its programmes and yearly activities, so that we can place them in a position to monitor and give us feedback. It is mainly an interface session between the commission and the civil society. What they learn from us they take back to the communities because they are closer to the communities than us and they give us feedback as to what the expectations of the communities are from ECOWAS. Then we build it into our programme reviews to develop more programmes that will benefit the people,” he said.

Sept. 27, 2017 @ 17:29 GMT |