Upper Egypt Local Development Program

The Upper Egypt Local Development Program seeks to improve the business environment and local government capacity for infrastructure and services in Qena, Sohag, Minya, and Assiut. It also supports Egypt’s decentralisation by empowering local governments to independently plan and manage investments, and encourages community engagement through citizen participation.

Objective

The objectives of the implementation support system are to (i) help the PCO and governorate staff – at governorate Dewan/ Markaz/ District levels – upgrade their approaches (including skills, tools and processes), (ii) provide trouble shooting support, and (iii) enable the programme as a whole to track progress over time, in order to enable regular adaptation to needs and opportunities on the ground.

Approach

VNG International provides the required technical support, professional expertise, and tailor-made capacity building programmes to both the central and the local administrations of the programme in various fields of expertise, by international and local experts. This includes, but is not limited to, the application of the social & environmental safeguards, occupational health & safety measures, feasibility studies, operational & maintenance plans, integrated local planning, road maintenance, procurement & financial management, planning & economic development, monitoring & evaluation, marketing, community engagement, process re-engineering, and managerial skills.

Results

• local governments have become more responsive to citizens’ needs, with new and more effective community engagement tools;
• national stakeholders have improved the processes of delivering shop permits, as a result of technical assistance on designing the new ‘shops permit workflow’, including 9 sub-services. Several workshops were conducted at the local level, to map the currently processes in use and identify the improvement points. As a product of these workshops, a service manual was developed and published with the improved processes of 50 public services as a key result.
• UELDP best practices rolled out to other governorates in Egypt, through training for high-level managers (assistant governors, secretary-generals, assistant secretary generals) across Egypt, on change management, RBM, and work environment.
• training to mid-level leaders (markaz and city managers, deputy managers), across Egypt, on Change management.