In partnership with Municipal Development Partnership (MDP) West, UN-HABITAT is implementing a Cities Alliance project aiming at drawing up a City Development Strategy and a local Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) for three medium- sized cities (Banfora, Bobo-Dioulasso and Ouahigouya), based on ECOLOC, a programme jointly launched by Club du Sahel and Partnership for Municipal Development (PDM) to assist local authorities to boost their local finance and economy. UN-HABITAT's technical assistance is aimed at strengthening the capacities of the three municipalities to formulate and implement poverty alleviation programmes at the local level. While MDP is implementing a component on the local economy, UN-HABITAT is responsible for the training of local leaders using manuals developed by UN-HABITAT's Training and Capacity-building Branch. The main objective of this joint project is to strengthen the capacities of local authorities and to develop a national training strategy.

Activities

• Training of trainers using the manuals developed by UN-HABITAT.
• Pilot workshop to evaluate the trainees.
• Training of municipal leaders and technicians in the three cities of Banfora, Bobo-Dioulasso and Ouahigouya.
• Developing and adapting the manuals to the national context for subsequent training sessions within a national training strategy for local leaders.

• Training institutions has been assessed in order to prepare the launching of the training component.
• ENDA Tiers Monde has been selected to prepare training sessions followed by a pilot workshop to test the new capacity of the trainees, while AGEDECOM, a national training and capacity-building institution, has been contracted to conduct the training sessions for local leaders and technician of the three municipalities.

As a result:

• 14 trainers have been trained.
• 60 councillors and technicians in total have been trained (24 from the municipality of Bobo-Dioulasso;18 from the municipality of Banfora; 18 from the municipality of Ouahigouya).