Africa-Press – Mozambique. THE Sustainable Development Goals Centre for Africa (SDGCA) is developing a tool kit that will guide non-state actors in Member States in creating awareness over the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and its opportunities.
Dr Ambrose Rwaheru, regional director of the SDGCA, said at the stakeholders’ meeting in Dar es Salaam for discussing Tanzania case studies on SADC engagement over the weekend that they were looking forward to launching the tool kit next month.
The case studies looked at engagement of different stakeholders, including Civil Society Organisations, Youths and the media.
The studies highlighted the status, challenges and way forward in engaging integration issues at national and regional level.
“We hope that the tool kit will start being applied from January next year. We would first present the draft to stakeholders for hearing their views for improving the document before it becomes functional,” Dr Rwaheru said.
Among other things, the tool kit would guide on summarising the vision and plans of the SADC.
“We need to simplify them so that they reach to the people and get to understand them right from grassroots,” he stressed.
Presenting a case study on Non-state actors and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) coordination mechanism for Tanzania, Mr Zaa Twalangeti, an official from Capacity Building Tanzania Organisation (CBTO), said the CSOs coordination for creating SADC awareness was crippled by the absence of national coordinating committee.
“There is a need for subnational level structures for coordinating SADC issues at district and regional level. But, these structures have to be capacitated,” Mr Twalangeti noted.
He said the CSOs and NGOs were facing challenge of lack of financial resources to bring them together for facilitating SADC issues in the country.
“For non-state actors to effectively participate there is a need to strengthen the national focal point capacity and put in place a SADC National Committee in the country,” he elaborated.
In his presentation, Prof Mohamed Bakari, a lecturer of the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), argued that to make regional integration strong people must be engaged.
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