BUCHANAN, Grand Bassa County – The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), on Wednesday began a three-day training workshop for over 90 program and finance technicians from 45 Civil Society Organizations across the country on UNDP’s standard operating procedures for partners’ engagement as it relates to acquiring low value grants.
It has been observed over the years that UNDP has become the partner of choice in the developing world probably because it has proven over time of being robust, reliable, transparent amongst others. Also, UNDP has installed numerous processes and procedures which have enabled it to provide clear checks and balances, and account for the funds given to them by funders as well as the quality of work produced. These measures range from financial risk management, audit, and procurement to quality delivery of development services.
The training also focused on building CSOs capacities to improve their programme planning, implementation, monitoring, filing, documentations and reporting.
UNDP in the past years had also engaged CSOs to deliver development assistance to the people of Liberia through grants; previous monitoring visits and documents reviewed indicate that there was a need to enhance the capacities of CSOs to adhere to UNDP rules in Financial Management and Reporting, among other things.
It is against this backdrop that UNDP is conducting training for CSOs to enable them to understand UNDP processes and improve the quality of implementation, M&E and reporting. Some key thematic areas include Documentation, Filing Processes, M&E, Reporting (Financial and Narrative).
Some of the main objectives of the event is to get UNDP’s partners to understand how its processes and procedures is crucial to achieving quality and timely implementation of development results; understanding the processes will significantly cut the length of time needed to complete financial transactions between UNDP and partners since partners will be well versed in its transactional processes and the reduction in transactional time will contribute to the increase and proficiency in implementation of programme activities.
Additionally, strengthening partners’ capacities to monitor and report on planned activities will in turn enhance their abilities to showcase key results for their various projects.
At the end of the training, it is expected that: partners will fully understand UNDP’s Standard Operating Procedures on operational engagements with partners, including the different financial modalities and cash transfer methods under the Low-Value Grant (LVG) Policy; UNDP partners will fully understand the different sections of the LVG Financial Reporting Form which document the need to accompany the report using a template. Also, Partners would understand how to properly conduct case management, documentation, and filing of all cases and case files for grant Management under UNDP rules, among others.