The Connected Development (CODE), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), has mobilised Community Development Charter (CDC) Champions to nominate and track implementation of constituency projects in Kaduna State.
CODE’s Team Lead in the state, Mr Abubakar Mohammed said this in an interview with our correspondent in Kaduna on Tuesday.
Reports have it that CDC is a written document containing the development needs of a community listed in order of priority facilitated by the CDC Champions.
The document will then be presented to the government as an official request of the community’s development needs.
Mohammed said that the NGO had trained 66 CDC Champions on constituency project nomination and tracking tools developed to ensure community participation in the delivery of the projects.
According to him, the champions have also been trained on the utilisation of the scorecard developed by CODE to assess the implementation of constituency projects in the state.
He explained that CODE leveraged the CDC champions because of their structures across the 23 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of the state for a robust monitoring of constituency projects.
Mohammed said that CDC champions would work in synergy with CODE Community Monitoring Teams made up of community stakeholders already tracking constituency protections in their communities.
The team lead explained that CODE was currently tracking the implementation of 118 constituency projects, 2020 to 2021, worth N6.4 billion across the 23 LGAs of the state.
He said that the tracking, with support from MacArthur Foundation, was under the “Deepening Citizens’’ Interest in Government Spending and Addressing Accompanying Corrupt Practices “(DeSPAAC)” project.
On nomination of constituency projects, Mohammed said that the CDC champions were trained on how they could nominate projects from their constituents and hand them over to the lawmakers for implementation.
Mohammed said that the move became necessary as most of the constituency projects were planned and sited without input of the community members leading to duplication and wastage.
“We have, therefore, trained the champions on how they can nominate a project and forward it to the Desk Officer at local government level, who will submit the nominated projects to the Legislative Aid of the lawmakers.
“The Legislative Aids will then submit the list of projects to the legislators who will vet the projects and select priority ones as his constituency projects for the next budget year.
“This, in the long run, will ensure community participation in the planning and implementation of constituency projects, with the projects addressing community needs,” he said.