Municipalities face a chain of challenges

After six months of intensive training through the “Local Governance Academy – (LGA)” training programme, the Kosovo Local Government Institute held the final session, at which the participants of the fifth generation of this programme were certified. The LGA is the largest education network for municipal officials; its programmes include lecture and training sessions, exchange of regional experience, group work and focused discussions among local actors.

The closing module, in a focused discussion format, addressed the main fields and dimensions in which local government extends and operates. This session, also run in the form of working groups, tested the skills of the programme participants in several areas, ranging from knowledge of legislation and policies, strategic management, a proactive approach to municipal services, good governance and management through integrated planning systems, to the operational and technical aspects of the day-to-day management of municipal affairs.

Through the training sessions and working groups, a focused evaluation of the programme was carried out, and these were also used as a way of verifying the capacities and sustainability of the network. The resulting data establish that the KLGI Institute has built a functional network and can begin a new phase of focused engagement in the functional fields and sectors of local governance.

In the testing phase of the working groups, divided by sectors and functional fields, quick facts from the analysis of work in the municipalities showed that local government continues to function in complete lack of clarity, ranging from a lack of cohesion between policies and legislation, ad hoc management, complicated procedures, and weak oversight and accountability, to the lack of citizen involvement in decision-making.

In view of these challenges, the KLGI Institute, together with its partners and the members of its network spread across all of Kosovo’s municipalities, has launched an initiative for focused engagement through the programme for empowering municipalities known as LGA-EMPOWER, which stems from the LGA training programme and network and is the result of the need for direct cross-level and cross-sectoral intervention to give full efficiency to decentralisation at local level.