The convergence was prior to Gambia government receiving finance from the World Bank for the social safety net project to the tune of US$30 million with a counterpart funding of US$1 million from the government.
The project development objectives were to improve the coordination of social assistance activities, provide temporal support to rural households in the wake of COVID-19 and increase inclusion of the extremely poor in the Nafa program.
The three-day forum held at the ChildFund Lodge Conference Hall in Bwiam, converged key stakeholders from all regions to review the recommendations from the September 2021 meeting on the progress reports on components 1 and 2.
Discussions included the way forward and recommendations with overview of the components of the Project Operation Manual (POM) and the Financial Management (FM) Manual, update on fiduciary management and ChildFund playful parenting among others.
However, the Nafa program was piloted in three districts before expanding to the remaining 17 districts. Since then, a lot of activities have been done by the implementing partners.
The convergence availed the partners the opportunity to take stock of what has been accomplished, challenges faced and to pave way for effective implementation and use of resources.
In his opening remarks, Dr Amat Bah, Executive Director/Project Coordinator of NaNA, acknowledged the partners for the effective and splendid job done through efficient collaboration, reflecting back to 1999 with their conceptual work, saying it was the effective partnership they had nurtured that had yielded results.
He said that all indications from the World Bank as the main sponsor of the project are that they are heading towards achieving a successful project. That NaNA cannot be part of anything else but to have a successful project. This was what they had been doing since they started working with the World Bank, he also said, adding that they had implemented successful projects and that the last project implemented was rated satisfactory, which led the Bank to go back to their peers and subject their work to a peer review.
He said the World Bank agreed that they were going to upgrade and rate the satisfactory implementation of the Maternal and Child Nutrition and Health Results Project (MCNHRP) to highly satisfactory, which he noted had never happened as far as World Bank projects were concerned in The Gambia.
He said they had been informed that The Gambia is one of the few countries around the world that had attained a highly satisfactory rating or outcome in the world, citing the Gambia and Maternal and Child Health Nutrition Results project as one of them.
Fatou Gibba, Director of Department of Community Development, said the forum was a stocktaking review on the past year, and equally looking at those challenges along the line also gave them the chance to collectively eradicate or minimize those challenges for effective work.
