Somalia
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Notes from Oct. 2007 RMT -
The UNCT is very strong and united under Eric Larouche, and just as importantly, a well funded and staffed RCO with impressive people in the posts.
They are interested in trying to move ahead on UN reform, and were inspired by a visit from Sally Fegan Wyles (strategically invited by Eric at just the right moment, her visit led to the formulation of a UN Transition Plan for two years, UNTPs, as you probably know, take the place of UNDAF where most of the UN work is humanitarian.)
The UNTP workshop was ably facilitated by Staff College, UNFPA-Dakar, with me as a resource person. It is not the greatest example of results based planning, but it is not bad. I was disappointed that the facilitators took the approach of encouraging very broad, general results statements - not at all SMART. On the other hand, getting consensus was a big issue for some agencies that are not at all used to working together. A big example was UNICEF on child protection trying to get consensus with UNDP on governance.
Now the RCO has come up with the idea of having one common "annual workplan" (their idea of what this is is very different from our idea) for each of the "zones" or "regions" in Somalia. Somalia has long been de facto although not de jure, divided into the self declared republic of Somaliland, a semi autonomous republic of Puntland that has a self declared intention to rejoin with a larger Somalia one day, and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, which as you know is engaged in a struggle to unite south and central Somalia.
The idea of the RCO is that all the work of the UN in each of the three zones would be captured in these annual workplans. I told the Coordination Officer, whose name is Genevieve, that we are ruled by something called PRoMS that insists on doing annual workplans by programme, and that what she is describing is what we call CPAPs. I could see that this did not sink in.
