Centre Trains 716 Officials On Planning, Budgeting Processes

The Centre for
Management Development (CMD) says it has built the capacity of no fewer than 716 officials from federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) on effective planning and budgeting.
CMD is an agency under the Ministry of Budget and National Planning with the mandate of providing services in the areas of management training and development, economic management, administration and research.
Its Director-General, Dr Kabir Usman, announced this to newsmen at a programme for directors of Planning, Research and Statistics (PRS) in Lagos on Thursday.
The programme was organised for 450 PRS directors and senior officials drawn from 50 Federal Government MDAs, aimed at building their skills on planning and budgeting.
Usman said that the agency had earlier trained 266 officials as train-the-trainers programmes.
According to him, this is to raise the capacity of staff in the areas of planning and budgeting as well as monetary evaluation.
“The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Sen. Udoma Udo Udoma, took it beyond this; we later got nominations from all the MDAs for this programme.
“They have come to learn how to articulate the future, link planning with budgeting and ensure that there is value for money kind of budgeting.’’
“2017 budget is what I call valuing budgeting because it targets areas of priority so CMD is providing that capacity,’’ he said.
Usman said that the minister had placed so much emphasis on capacity building and had mandated the agency to build capacity of officials on understanding budgeting such as Zero-based budgeting.
“People conceive projects but they don’t really articulate it very well, funds are allocated and you have so many abandoned and uncompleted projects.
“This is a disaster because it costs a lot in the country; it simply means there is a wastage and linkage,’’ he said.
According to him, the officials attending the workshop for the past three days will go to their various MDAs to implement what they have learnt.
Usman said that the knowledge acquired from the training would help them to analyse the importance of the Medium Term Sector Plan (MTSP) to national development goals.
He said it would help them to analyse the critical role of the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) to achieve sustainable development.
“They will be able to analyse the significance of research and statistics in policy making and implementation; critique current project selection and implementation processes.
“They will also be able to use strategic planning techniques for goal achievement and identify impeding forces in strategic planning,’’ Usman said.
In addition, he said, the participants would be able to create an intelligent linkage between strategic plans, policies and budgeting process.
“I wish we would get additional funding to support the director of PRS, commissioners of budgeting and planning from all the states.
“This is a national government; the ministry doesn’t only plan for the Federal Government but for the nation.
“If we have opportunity, we will extend the training to the local government level.
“Certainly, we need to build the capacity of our people; for the past three years, we have been struggling to enable us to do that.
“We are grateful to the minister for giving us the opportunity which we have not had for three years,’’ Usman said.
The theme of the workshop is “Strategic Planning, Plan Formulation and Effective Linkage to the Budgeting Process”.