Habitat trains local leaders on good governance

A training programme on good local governance and leadership for Somalia is being conducted by the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) for trainers from Puntland, Somaliland and southern Somalia in the western Kenyan town of Nakuru. The two-part training, which covers various activities grouped under "Building bridges through managing conflicts and differences" and "Building bridges through participatory planning", aims to improve the capacity of Somalia's local leaders to deal with the challenges of post-conflict development. The ongoing training is a follow-up of previous programmes in various Somali towns like Hargeysa and Garowe. It is being attended by 21 Somali researchers, lawyers, local officials and NGO leaders from seven cities. "Somalia is a post-conflict country that needs assistance. The way to sustainable development in such a situation is through good local governance," Tomasz Sudra, senior coordinator of Habitat's Good Local Governance and Leadership Training Programme, told IRIN. According to Habitat, the Somalia programme, which is funded by the EC, was started in response to a situation where human settlements had been severely affected by war, especially by the physical destruction of infrastructure and services. To add to the burdens, "returnees and IDPs [internally displaced persons] have chosen towns as destinations for resettlement," said Habitat. Unfortunately, local institutions "are not in a position to address these pressures and their records and human resources capacity has been depleted". "Given the post-conflict scenario, Somalia needs to move fast... We are obliged to achieve as much as we can quickly," Filiep Decorte, the Habitat programme manager in Somalia, told IRIN. The Nakuru training, he added, would be followed by regional training activities and city consultations. Bobe Yusuf Du'ale from the Somalia Academy for Peace and Development in Hargeysa and Muhammad Muhammad Afrah, a lawyer based in the capital, Mogadishu, who were attending the training programme, both said it would help Somalia "fill in the gaps" as it builds new leadership systems. According to the 2002 Somalia Urban Sector profile, prepared by Habitat and the EU, "Somalia faces severe development problems in its urban areas which cannot be satisfactorily addressed without a coherent urban development strategy". Somalia's urban population accounted for about 35 percent of the 3.5 million people who lived in the country, but services in the urban centres were badly lacking, the report said. Water and electricity supply, it noted, were inadequate, while poverty was rampant. In Hargeysa, for example, the report said, most households in returnee settlement areas spent less than a dollar to feed six to seven people.