Supporting learning through peer-to-peer exchanges and experience sharing among Local Governments.
 

As part of the implementation approaches of the IDEAL Programme, a benchmarking and field exposure visit was organized for all the IDEAL Local Governments to Koboko Municipal Council. The benchmarking was mainly intended to facilitate peer-to-peer exchanges and experience sharing among the IDEAL teams and build their capacity to be agents of change within their respective LG.

Koboko Municipality presented a unique opportunity for all the 27 participants from the 7 IDEAL Local governments as a result of; the change stories from Koboko Municipality in relation to community engagement and feedback mechanisms and waste management systems and processes as shared during the Focal Persons meetings; besides these, there was great interest in the scale and scope of the EU Trust Fund for Koboko Municipal Council. For a number of Focal Persons who had never travelled to the border towns of Northern Uganda, this exposure visit was an opportunity for them to appreciate the different social cultural and geopolitical settings in which Local Governments function in different parts of the country.

One of the most striking aspects of Koboko Municipality was the warm reception the team was given by the Resident District Commissioner, the Mayor and all the technical team of the Municipality. The teamwork and cordial environment was evident as speaker after speaker introduced themselves and asked the visitors to feel safe and enjoy their time in Koboko. The coordination of activities and the shared responsibilities were some of the collective approaches that the Koboko team strongly demonstrated which the visiting team was curious to learn pick a leaf from.

During the plenary sessions of the engagements, the Assistant Town Clerks, the Senior Community Development Officer and the Municipal Health Inspector made different presentations, shared challenges and narrated lessons learnt from the different activities they have implemented within the IDEAL Programme. These presentations were supplemented with field tours where the visiting teams were allowed to directly interact with community structures such as; youth groups, women’s groups, market vendors, LC I and IIs executives and opinion leaders. From these interactions, the teams were able to compare and contrast how Koboko Municipality relates with the citizens and the community structures against their own experiences back home. During feedback sessions and experience sharing, the participants highlighted the following issues as key learning points to take back home:
 

• The value of deliberately investing in accurate data to inform planning for better service delivery and lobbying for funding from the central government and development partners.
• The willingness and commitment of the political and technical leadership of the Local Government plays a key role in lobbying, advocacy and rallying the Local Government teams to explore available space to improve service delivery and attain close collaborations with communities and central government.
• Active participation of the community, through regular engagements and feedback sessions builds more trust and confidence in what local leaders are doing and nurtures strong collaborations in service delivery. 
• Local governments can promote inclusion by investing in the capacity and engagement of community structures such as youth groups, women groups, groups of persons with disability, market vendors, bodaboda associations, bus and taxi operators to participate in different aspects of service delivery and governance.
• Waste management is not a responsibility of a single department; to attain sustainable waste management efforts, there is need for a collective effort of all actors and a coordinated effort to effectively address the waste management challenges, especially in urban areas.

At the end of the bench marking, all the 27 participants appreciated that they had a few lessons to take home and would share their experiences within their Technical Planning Committees in order to adapt some of the best practices exhibited. The exchange visit has further opened strong collaborations and engagements between the different Local Governments as the Focal Persons continuously consult each other on some of the experiences shared.

By Ejibua Sam Anguzu
Resident Programme Manager – IDEAL Uganda