Personnel Management Office Serves as Project Director -PS Sallah

The permanent secretary was speaking at the opening ceremony of a two-day stakeholder's workshop on public service reform and institutional capacity development project. The workshop was jointly organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and held on Tuesday at the Atlantic Hotel, in Banjul. He pointed out that the main purpose of this planning workshop is to discuss, in detail, the work and monitoring plan for the public services and institutional capacity development project. "This project was conceived a year ago following government's formulation of the public sector reform strategy document 2007 -2011, a major component of the poverty reduction strategy paper 2," he said.

He affirmed that in view of this situation and given the absence of a comprehensive approach to civil service reform, government willingly undertook with UNDP support in 1999 to design and implement a reform programme directed at the public service management, as part of an overall six component national government programme. He added that as the attainment of the goals of the public sector reform strategy dovetails well with the objectives of Vision 2020, the PRSP 2 and the Millennium Development Goals ( MDG's), the UNDP country office expressed an interest in funding part of the project. "On the basis of this expression of interest, the UNDP Regional Bureau decided to initially allocate US$ 1.45 million to fund the public service reform sector component," he stated.

He said the government of Spain, through the Democratic Governance Thematic Trust Fund (DGTTF), provided the funds, with the UNDP's local contribution of US$ 30,000 the total amount currently available is US$ 1.8 Million for a three-year period from 2007-2010.

The stakeholders workshop was attended all the key donor agencies including senior government officials, senior auditors, the national auditor, the dynamic staff of PMO, Journalists and representatives from UNDP.