Knowledge gain will help put an end to the cacophony that prevail in the system.

It is on record that most municipal authorities are not abreast with the contract award procedure. As a result most contracts are awarded without the respect of contract norms thus leading to poorly executed projects. Against this back drop, the public Contract Regulatory Agency, ARMP, in collaboration with the National Community Driven Development Program PNDP recently organised a one week work shop to train stake holders from the West and North West Region. The participants mostly mayors, presidents of public contract boards, and Members as well as members of the councils award board, Senior Divisional Officers amongst others, is aimed at fostering the decentralisation process envisage by the government. For one week the over 250 participants will be drilled on topics such as “identification of contracts to be awarded”, “planning the commencement and end of procedures”, “preparing the timeline of each contracts to be awarded”, “preparing the contract award plan” and “preparing the contracts award journal”.

As explained by the head of Department of Capacity Building in ARMP, Tchatat Hubert, the workshop is part of the support to local development. He said the programme will re-enforced councils and their tender boards on the award contract. He further explained that they want the public contract award procedure to be harmonised and meet up with World Bank expectation. On his part the Head of Internal Audit of PND. George Meka Abessolo, revealed that the government has allocated about three billion so as to support and hasten decentralisation and local development. He said it will also re-enforce the council and their tender boards on the award of contracts. He was optimistic that at the end of the one week workshop participants would have master public contract procedures and use it well in the award of contracts.

Worthy of note is that the programming of the award of public contract will ensure an increase in the rate of consumption of investment credits and consequently that of execution of projects, it will also better the mastery of time limits and respect of the regulatory stages of the award of contracts, it will reduce the abusive use of the procedure of urgency and the splitting of contracts as well as master the work load of tenders Boards and the cost of independent observers.