The event held at the Governor’s Office in Lower River Region, is part of ActionAid’s ongoing commitment to fostering inclusive dialogue, transparency, and collaboration in governance and development processes.
Addressing the gathering, Seedy Lamin Bah, governor of LRR highlighted that TAC is a quarterly report or quarterly meeting they do to be able to understand the activities of the various public institutions that are represented in our region.
“It is a very important meeting, as we will correlate the activity reports and this is expected to be submitted to the various ministries for assistance where necessary, if the need be, some of them will be related to cabinet for us to facilitate it.”
He urged participants to always remember that as regional administration their role is to implement the policies, programs and projects of government.
“So where there is a need for us to amend the policy, then it has to come from the grassroots and this is where we pick it up and you are the technical advisors on matters regarding your departments in the region.”
Saikou Darboe, program manager ActionAid International explained that they organized this forum for government and non-governmental institutions to do presentations on their work.
This, he said, will help the government to be able to correlate and know what every institution is doing.”
“We should report to them as to what we are doing, have done and about to do. This should mandatory on every institution to come and report here for accountability”.
Mustapha Sanyang, representing the Minister of Public Services maintained that these activities are basically in line with the government's agenda to strengthen engagement with citizens.
“We feel there is a responsibility to engage landholders in ensuring that they are aware of government programs and development agenda. When we have activities like, institutions can share their activities thus, those mechanisms should be strengthened to allow people to be able to engage and to enhance transparency and accountability.”
He said government is subscribed to open government partnership where there's a national action plan that dictates that government should prioritize engaging citizens regularly.
