Towards ensuring sustainability of the interventions and technical support being provided by USAID funded State2State Activity in Gombe, the State government has been advised to invest heavily in capacity building and development of civil servants.
The Capacity Building Advisor of the USAID State2State Activity, Ms Murna Ezra gave the advice at the three-day Work Plan Consultative Retreat organized by State2State Activity, Gombe Field Office, being held in Bauchi.
During a question and answer session, following a paper presentation titled; “Capacity Building Approach for Year 4”, Ms Ezra said the state government has a responsibility to ensure training and retraining of civil servants for them to face evolving challenges head long, and achieve global best practice.
She advised that a short form questionnaire be developed and distributed to staff to indicate the areas they want to be trained so that their capacity would be built based on areas of need.
In separate responses, the participants agreed to the submission by the Capacity Building Specialist and assured to to cascade the knowledge they acquire during various trainings, to their subordinates for enhanced service delivery.
The Director, Planning, Research and Statistics, Gombe state ministry of health, Dr Suraj Abdulkarim who noted that the state had provision for staff capacity building and development, but was not fully utilized, emphasised the need to tap resources from such provisions for effectively improvement in the state civil service.
In his submission, the Executive Chairman of the State Fiscal Responsibility Commission, Abubakar Inuwa Tata stressed that cascading knowledge of trainings attended was vital to the subordinates, however called on the facilitators to share the workshop materials with the participants so as to make reference where need be.
State2State Activity is a USAID funded program, being implemented in six Nigerian states of Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Ebonyi, Gombe and Sokoto with focus on three thematic areas of Health Education and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.