Revenue Watch Pilots "Regional Hub" for Capacity Building

	Hub trainees visit a mining community

Revenue Watch and its partners in Ghana took a remarkable step in building local capacity this July, with the launch of our first Africa Regional Extractive Industry Knowledge Hub in Accra. The Hub will be a training resource on extractives and related governance issues for members of civil society, parliament, media and sub-national governments from throughout West Africa. The Hub is a pilot program that RWI plans to replicate over the next several years in other resource-rich regions, including Latin America, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and Southeast Asia.

Revenue Watch's regional Hub program is intended to train key stakeholders and empower trainees to train other citizens, activists and members of government and industry. This approach enables regional institutions to better serve their local and national interests, by developing and drawing on a base of local knowledge. While some resource-dependent countries have managed to establish pockets of knowledge and expertise in extractive resource management, most have severe deficits in their capacity to make prudent decisions on incomes and expenditures and undertake effective oversight.  Even in countries with some capacity, wide knowledge gaps persist between the groups whose combined expertise is needed for effective growth.

"We are building capacity to build capacity," explained RWI Training and Capacity Building Program Officer Angela Mugore. "We're establishing a Hub, to be run by Africans for Africans."

Our pilot Hub in Ghana is a joint effort between RWI, the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and local partner the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).  GIMPA will serve as the host institution, incubating this Hub into a center that specializes in extractives, and provides a number of training services for Ghana and the entire region. The Hub will be developed over three years, with assistance from RWI's capacity building and technical resources teams, transitioning to a fully independent and sustainable center within GIMPA.

In July, 24 civil society activists, local government officials, parliamentary staff and media representatives from Tanzania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana attended the Hub's first "summer school" training course on "Governance in Oil, Mining and Gas Revenues."

"In addition to running the summer school, the Hub will operate stand-alone courses on EITI and 'policy-buster' workshops, to help activists analyze and engage with new policies," Mugore explained. "We've tried to work with locals as much as possible. Because our international partners have led similar workshops, we paired them with the local experts to come up with content specifically tailored to the needs of local participants."

Participants were exposed to the range of extractive sector stakeholders, through visits to a mining company, a community in the mining district, and local government officials. They discussed the process of gold extraction with industry representatives and industry responsibility with a corporate social worker. Members of the press attending the summer school also wrote a number of articles and broadcast reports to develop their fluency in covering extractive related issues.

At the end of the course, Mugore said, the participants were divided into country groups to translate lessons from the course into six month action plans, with specific roles and follow-up responsibilities for each member. Each group also made plans for ongoing support from Hub trainers and experts, to develop and implement their advocacy goals. Ghanaian participants, for instance, planned to scrutinize the new national oil and gas policies, with guidance from the Hub's resource expert.

Participants in the Hub training discuss extractive issues

Course participant Bubelwa Kaiza of ForDIA Tanzania explained the usefulness of the training for Tanzanians. "The course content was rich; informative and educative, and facilitators were excellent," Kaiza wrote. He noted that the course came at an opportune time since Tanzania became an EITI implementing country in February. "PWYP members together with Civil Society Organizations in the country will, by mid September, launch the Tanzania PWYP national campaign coalition. Specialized knowledge, experience and skills across the board of the extractive industries, has at this juncture, become vital for Tanzanians; hence the significance of EI Knowledge Hub Summer Course at GIMPA."       

"We're hoping that when we do next year's course, we’ll have more countries involved as well," said Mugore. "Over time, the experts 'on tap' will grow, and if a regional person needs an expert, they’ll have a large pool to draw on."

The staff of the Ghana Hub, Manager Gilbert Sam and Research Officer Richard Hato-Kuevor, are developing an expert library with relevant documents for trainees as well as an email forum for participants to review new documents and conduct research, ensuring the spread of information and capacity throughout Africa and, in the future, across other regions.

Contact africaeikh@gimpa.edu.gh for more information and check back on RWI's website for training modules based on the Hub summer session and news of future trainings.

LEARN MORE

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