SW officials train on economic reporting

The government of Cameroon in elaborating economic and social policy, needs analytical support tools to permit her not only to have an overview of progress made in the course of the year at both the regional and national levels.

This also highlights the potentials, contributions of regions and divisions of the country to development endeavours as well as gaps and inequalities between regions in order to reduce effects in future budgetary programming operations.

It is against these backdrops that the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development (MINEPAT) organised a one day training workshop on Tuesday 15 July in Buea for Regional delegates of different ministries and the six divisional delegates of MINEPAT in the region to acquaint them with the guidelines of drafting Cameroon Economic Development Report (RADEC).

The workshop according to the South West Regional delegate of MINEPAT, Mr. Issa Felix is a stitch in time given that regional service heads hitherto never understood the importance of the Economic report and hence gave inappropriate data.

The importance of the workshop, he stressed, is not only that the resource persons now comprehend the goals of the Economic report but also that useful data would henceforth be collected that will enable them make appraisal of the financial and physical realisation in the field and the difficulties involved so that they can be corrected.

One of the mission representatives from MINEPAT, Noussi Metsakeui Damas Euclide, in his presentation stressed on the need for the respect of deadlines for data collected to reach the regional delegation of MINEPAT and the Ministry for a national summary Economic report to be elaborated which takes into accounts problems in the regional reports to be inserted in the future budgetary programming operations.

The training he stated, aimed at redressing some shortcomings such as lack of harmonisation of regional reports, lack of specific data, non-integration of all sources of wealth and non-consideration of local councils development endeavours amongst others.

At the end of the workshop chaired by the Head of the Social and Cultural Division at the South West Governor’s office, Julius Tata, participants were drilled on specified format and timeframe for drafting future divisional and regional reports as well as identifying sets of minimum indicators to feature in RADEC including aspects related to gender mainstreaming and underprivileged groups.