Under the patronage of Jordanian Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Suhair Al-Ali and in her presence, UN-ESCWA will hold a Subregional Brainstorming Meeting entitled “A Decade of UN-ESCWA Achievements in the Field of Local community Development” at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman, Jordan, on 4 March 2007. The meeting is being organized in collaboration with the League of Arab States (LAS), Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organizations (AGFUND), Regional Centre on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development for the Near East (CARDNE), Centre for Strategic Studies in the Middle East (CESMO), and Safadi Foundation.

Set to open Sunday at 09:30am, the meeting will seek to assess the local community development (LCD) approach and take up the benefit of it as a model to design LCD integrated policy. Using the suggestions of participants, the meeting will seek to formulate proposals for further developing UN-ESCWA programmes and proposals for capacity-building, enhancing partnerships, and deriving the maximum benefit from them. In other words, UN-ESCWA and the collaborating parties will try to reverse the roles so as to prompt “end-users” in the field of LCD to propose the methods and means they believe would ensure sound partnership in the development process and encourage social dialogue with regard to social public issues.

In order to optimize the outcome of the meeting, the meeting will host prominent experts in the field of LCD as well as selected beneficiaries of UN-ESCWA projects who are involved in management of government and civil society programmes. It will also be attended by representatives of donor parties and officials in charge of development projects and programmes at the local, regional and international levels.

It is worth mentioning that based on its wide experience on the importance of human resources and the degree of implementation of the LCD participatory approach, UN-ESCWA has developed manuals and training programmes aiming at building capacities, increasing knowledge and skills and enhancing the constructive intervention of workers, trainers and researchers in the field of LCD with a view to empowering local communities and enabling them to participate actively in the development process. These manuals and relevant training programmes were mainly designed to overcome the obstacles constraining the development work undertaken by governments, civil society institutions and international organizations working in the field of LCD. The main obstacles have been the absence of an impact-based LCD approach and its basic policies and components, acute shortage of comprehensive Arabic literature, and scarcity of qualified and competent cadres capable of managing development projects, training programmes and participatory research programmes.