ENB:04:11
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UNSO
: Tijan Jallow, a technical advisor with UNSO,
discussed capacity building for sustainable natural resources
management. He said that capacity-building involves improvement
in: human resource development; laws and regulations; and
physical assets and procedures that govern the operations of the
institutions. He listed the hindrances to capacity-building as:
failure in the delivery system in implementation and monitoring;
weak management and coordination in the recipient countries and
support from the donors; the lack of a "market" for technical
assessment, which is supply rather than demand driven; and a poor
"enabling" environment. He said the most notable issue in sub-
saharan Africa is the erosion of capacity. He said the Convention
should first identify the constraints in development efforts in
the past, including: community involvement; rights to local
resources; and sectoral, large scale, capital intensive and
imported approaches. He also said success depended on
decentralization and empowerment, provision of secure rights to
resources, flexibility in project implementation and community
involvement in institution building. Some questions that need
answers are: whether local communities can take over these new
responsibilities; to what extent the state could allow
empowerment to grow; what external support was needed; the legal
and administrative measures required; and how long the common
interest at the community level stratification would continue. He
emphasized that capacity building should be recipient, not donor,
driven.