Arewa Research and Development Project has organized a two-day capacity training on Open Government Partnership (OGP) to thirty-five selected members of civil society organizations in Zamfara State.
The training which was organized with the support from MacArthur foundation is targeted at empowering the capacity of the civil society actors in the state on how best to engage the government in areas of anti-corruption, accountability in the management of the state resources and access to information.
Director of the ARDP Prof. Kabiru Sulaiman Chafe who led the training session called on the participants to take advantage of the new (OGP) project to actively engage the state government in a more productive way with a view to contributing significantly to the desired changes.
Chafe urged the participants to be active and continue to strengthen partnership within their network as civil society organizations, and also leverage on the new ideas to re-enforce engagement with the government.
The lead resource person for the training Dr. Anas Sani Anka said what ARDP/MacArthur foundation is doing in Zamfara through the new (OGP) project is to sales out new strategies on open government engagement to enable the civil society organizations to widen the scope of their commitment toward the desired reforms.
He noted that though the old methods of civil society engagement with the government in Zamfara are working, the new (OGP) project is an opportunity to strengthen the capacity of the members of the civil society to understanding the global best form of engagement.
At the end of the training of a technical committee was constituted with a mandate to come up with new forms of commitments that are going to shape the CSO’s engagement on OGP.
Social media platforms were provided through which discussions and dialogue on the thematic areas of commitment would be institutionalized.
