In its quest to promote good governance policies and initiatives, the National Secretariat of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) over the weekend continued its regional cluster dialogues in western and rural Liberia.
The African Peer Review Mechanism’s national dialogues aim at educating participants on natural resources governance and domestic resources mobilization in western and rural Liberia, which includes Bomi, Cape Mount, Gbarpolu and Montserrado counties.
The National Secretariat of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), headed by its Executive Director, Wilfred K. Selmah, moved into Bentol and the Mount Coffee belt to get diverse views from youth groups, women, elders, chiefs and the county administrative team for a way forward as it regards natural resources governance and domestic resources mobilization in the country.
The stakeholders’ meetings were held under the leadership of the Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Samuel D. Tweah Jr., who is the focal person of the Liberia program.
The meetings gathered substantive information from the various groupings as to how the government is to go about with its financial reform so that the trickle-down effect can have a greater impact on the low-level financial communities.
The APRM Secretariat, however, urged the various communities to actively engage government to bring to their various areas community-oriented development projects.
Making remarks at the opening of the stakeholders’ dialogues, the Executive Director of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), Wilfred K. Selmah, extended thanks and appropriation to the participants and the African Development Bank (AfDB) for the level of support in capacity building and other key sectors over the years. AfDB, he disclosed, is in line with APRM’s pillar two: economic and governance management.
He noted that the importance of the workshop is to acquaint stakeholders with the major tenets of natural resource governance and domestic resource mobilization.
According to him, the dialogues also promote an in-depth discussion among stakeholders to generate feedback on their respective roles, as described on the basic features of the current test version of the domestic resources mobilization program.
In response, a representative from the various groupings thanked the Government of Liberia (GOL) and its partners, the partnership of the AfDB under the integrated public financial management reform project (IPFMR) phase, in collaboration with the project management unit (PFMU) of the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning for the important initiative regarding their knowledge of the financial reform policies and its different levels.
The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is a mutually agreed instrument voluntarily acceded to by the member states of the African Union as a self-monitoring mechanism. It was founded in 2003.