By Bashir Hassan Abubakar
The USAID Nigeria funded State Accountability, Transparency and Effectiveness (State2State) Activity, has proffered avenues on how Bauchi State Government and other focused States could sustain the best practices and lessons learnt from the intervention.
The Citizens Engagement and CSO Director of USAID State2State, Ahmed Mohammed, while making presentation today at the ongoing Year 5 Work Plan Bauchi State Level Consultative Workshop said that sustainability within the context of USAID State2State is aimed at ensuring that its interventions and governance reforms should be maintained, institutionalized, and even scaled-up and replicated in other sectors of Governance.
Mohammed said that, for this to be achieved, it will be better for Bauchi State and other States to focus on Institutional /Organizational Sustainability with a view to ensuring effective and efficient working and operations of the targeted priority Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), Bauchi State House of Assembly (BAHA) and the Four Focal LGAs on governance/public financial management (PFM), citizen engagement reforms and improved service delivery that State2State has supported in strengthening their organizational capacity.
The Director said that another approach to sustaining what USAID State2State has done is the Programmatic Sustainability, which centers specifically on ensuring that the subnational government through the priority MDAs, SHoA, LGAs and CSOs begin to sustain, scale-up and replicate the programmatic initiatives/interventions and governance reforms specifically on PFM, citizen engagement, GESI and conflict sensitivity for improved governance and service delivery in each of the partner states.
Mohammed also identifies Financial Sustainability, which focuses on ensuring steady flow of funds, and generating more revenues for the State as another measure to ensure sustainability.
Other channels to achieve sustainability according to the Director should be centered on effective and efficient allocation of funds/revenues, as well as releases and application/utilization of such revenues to State and LGAs for: Maintaining, institutionalizing, scaling, and replicating the State2State’s interventions and reforms especially in the targeted priority service delivery sectors of Primary Healthcare, Basic Education and WASH, for improved service delivery in each of the partner states.
At the end of his presentation, participants at the workshop also shared their enthusiasm on the need to sustain the intervention of USAID State2State in Bauchi State and further replicate to other sectors, using the approaches proffered by USAID State2State.