Following an earlier briefing for President Ernest Bai Koroma, Civil Society Organisations and development partners heard last week (10 January 17) how the delivery process applied to the President’s Recovery Priorities could deliver an impressive 77% of its intended outcomes by the end of the year. This is despite challenges around capacity, delayed funding and the disbursement of funds.
At the mid-term review of the President’s Recovery Priorities, organised for development partners and civil society organisations, Saidu Conton-Sesay, the Chief of Staff, explained that the event was intended to allow stakeholders to assess results in the seven sectors – education, energy, governance, health, private sector development, social protection and water – as well as provide a look forward to objectives outstanding.
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, team leader of the President’s Delivery Team reminded the audience of the ambitious scale of the process: “The President’s Recovery Priorities consist of 13 key result area targets across seven priority sectors to be delivered in 12 months. It will take 146 sub-initiatives to deliver these results,” she said. “It has been a demanding process with continuous performance measurement and extremely tight schedules.”
She reiterated that the delivery approach to public services taken by the President’s Recovery Priorities is an improvement in public service delivery for Sierra Leone. It is intended to achieve two key objectives – firstly meet clear and measureable targets in the priority sectors, and secondly contribute to the building of service delivery capacity within the participating sector ministries, departments and agencies and within the district level structures.
“We ensure that we are collecting reliable and verifiable data to track the progress of initiatives and we have developed a process which allows issues to be resolved when they arise. Currently there are no issues with getting verifiable data for 52% of initiatives involved in the President’s Recovery Priorities. We have plans on how to address areas where data collection is proving an issue,” she explained.
A survey of District Council Leaders carried out in early December 2016 indicates that the President’s Recovery Priorities process is improving service delivery with 94% of respondents supporting that statement.
In a recent assessment by the UK’s Department for International Development, the main funding partner, the President’s Recovery Priorities programme was given an A+ rating, which is the highest rating achievable at this phase.
