This report presents the activities carried out by UCLG Africa in 2022. It starts off with the message of the Secretary-General, then gives an overview of the actions performed by UCLG Africa and by the different programs throughout the past year.
Capacity and Knowledge Management of Local Authorities and National Associations
A year of adaptation and resilience for Local Africa
2021 is the first year of implementation of the ten-year strategic plan of UCLG Africa adopted by the Executive Committee in December 2020(GADDEPA 2.0). The year 2021 was strongly marked by the Covid-19 health crisis, the impacts of which continue to be felt around the world in terms of populations being quarantined, restriction of movements, and in terms of everyone’s adaptation to this new environment. Due to the pandemic, the 9th edition of the Africities Summit, which should have been held in November 2021 in Kisumu, Kenya, had to be postponed to May 2022. Adapting to the health crisis has, since 2020, led the ramping up of the digitization of human activities, both in the business world and in the governance of public affairs.
e-government is on the agenda everywhere, while the conditions for its development in terms of infrastructure, financing, and institutional and regulatory frameworks are barely in place in most African countries. Address the widening digital divide of local authorities compared to their counterparts in other regions of the world, UCLG Africa has launched the digitalization of its academy which contributes to the digital transformation of its members. The Africa Local Government Academy (ALGA) has embarked on the digitalization of its training courses and the development of an e-learning platform allowing remote access to courses and adaptation to the current environment of travel restrictions while greatly reducing training costs. This option is all the more likely to prosper since Africa is among the regions of the world where the adoption of digital solutions is among the fastest to slove the problems encountered by populations in their economic activities, in everyday, or in the governance of public affairs.
e-government is on the agenda everywhere, while the conditions for its development in terms of infrastructure, financing, and institutional and regulatory frameworks are barely in place in most African countries. Address the widening digital divide of local authorities compared to their counterparts in other regions of the world, UCLG Africa has launched the digitalization of its academy which contributes to the digital transformation of its members. The Africa Local Government Academy (ALGA) has embarked on the digitalization of its training courses and the development of an e-learning platform allowing remote access to courses and adaptation to the current environment of travel restrictions while greatly reducing training costs.
This option is all the more likely to prosper since Africa is among the regions of the world where the adoption of digital solutions is among the fastest to slove the problems encountered by populations in their economic activities, in everyday, or in the governance of public affairs. The area of intervention where a decisive impetus has come from is that of climate. UCLG Africa has successfully gained a foothold in the institutional ecosystem set up at the international level to address issues related to climate change. UCLG Africa has successfully gained a foothold in the institutional ecosystem set up at the international level to address issues related to climate change.
Through their continental umbrella organization, local and -regional authorities in Africa are now present in international bodies dealing with climate action and of the means of its implementation, including the establishment of conditions for local authorities’ access to climate finance.
The other concern that caught the attention during the year 2021 is the reorganization of the General Secretariat of UCLG Africa to align the 2021-2030 strategy with the institutional, human, and financial means for its implementation. A great effort has been made to restructure the Secretariat and the Regional Offices of UCLG Africa, an effort that will be continued over the next three years.
Among the major innovations, the launch of the technical assistance pillar for the preparation and implementation of projects that was identified as the missing link, and under which an effort to strengthen the capacities of members and their national associations has been identified as crucial. This pillar should reach maturity in 2024 when each Regional Office of UCLG Africa will have been equipped with a unit providing technical assistance to members for setting up projects and seeking their funding. The year 2021 has truly put UCLG Africa on a new, very demanding trajectory in terms of adapting to a rapidly changing environment.
This new trajectory requires us to be very rooted in the reality experienced by the members and to seek with them concrete responses to bring to the populations, in order to improve their conditions and their living environment. This concern requires also greater proximity in the organization of UCLG Africa’s interventions, hence the ramping up of Regional Offices which will gradually be equipped with the capacity to provide local technical assistance to members. The goal of rapidly achieving results, particularly in the implementation of national policies and global agendas, does position local and regional authorities as strategic agents for initiating the dynamics of structural transformation of the continent.
This goal also encourages the diversification of the partnerships that local authorities must establish with other relevant actors so that both the ecological transition with a view to sustainable human development and the adoption of reflexes of solidarity within the communities become everyone’s business.
For UCLG Africa, the year 2021 marked a milestone for this mutation with the aim of becoming a definitively mature and useful organization by 2030.This is the whole meaning of the 2021-2030 ten-year strategy adopted by the governing bodies of the organization (GADDEPA 2.0).
The standards of excellence in Human Resources Management at Subnational Level in Africa
Beyond the institutional, legal, financial, and technical aspects, the sustainable development in its different dimensions of any country depends first and foremost on the human potential of its institutions and organizations.
Therefore, it is crucial that these institutions and organizations can have human resources, collaborators, and employees working and carrying out their a ctivities and undertaking their duties in a supportive, facilitating, attractive, and motivating environment.
Nevertheless, the weakness in terms of human resources within the Local and Regional Governments represents a major handicap in the effectiveness of Decentralizati on and its deployment at the subnational level, forcing these entities to rely for their project management, their organization, and their operations, either on decentralized services or central State administrations, on consulting firms, or on partners an d donors.
This situation has given a bad image of the Local Governments accused of incompetence and lack of professionalism, as having difficulty in being efficient and in ensuring and delivering quality services to the populations, or pushing the citizens to lose confidence in this level of governance.
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