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Other donor and implementing partner interviewees indicated that coordination could be
improved through more consistent participation by the various donors, particularly outside the
pre-election period. One donor explained:
Coordination is lacking among donors…Donors did a much better job of
coordinating in 2010…We need to figure out a way to maintain the
Democratization Steering Committee for Interpeace specific work but also have
something broader for democracy and governance support to Somaliland. We
tried to do this by setting up the Democratization Coordination Committee, which
is inclusive of more partners.
In addition to coordination among donors and implementing partners, there have also been cases
of successful coordination between the international community and Somaliland institutions.
For example, the National Electoral Commission has served as a coordinator for voter education
programming being conducted in advance of elections. According to one implementing partner:
The coordination was through the National Election Commission, but all the
organizations working on civic voter education will come so they would all say
these are what we have planned. We're planning to do some voter education;
we're planning to go to these regions; we're planning to go to these regions. And
they would sort of map out - have we covered enough regions, if there's
something that's missing, and so on.
The National Electoral Commission also identified Progressio to serve as the “official facilitator
and organizer of all of the international election observers” in 2005, 2010 and 2012 through a
formal memorandum of understanding. Similarly, the speaker of the House of Representatives
took the initiative to coordinate support to parliament: “the speaker held coordination meetings,
and so, IRI, the Association of European Parliamentarians for Africa and UN sat down and
hashed out what we were doing in that. I mean, that was good because that was partner-driven,
we’re going to divide the labor.” The Ministry of Interior has also worked to establish a
mechanism for coordination of governance initiatives, the structures of which remain in the
early stages of development, with the UN Development Program as the co-chair.
In other areas however, one interviewee explained:
I mean the districts have their planning process. The national level has their
planning processes. Sector ministries have their planning processes. NGOs have
their planning processes, and the UN projects have that. So everyone has their
own things and there's not yet really that synergy. How can you make sure that
you still link community priorities to national targets that it’s still nationally-
owned and that you then are able to draw in resources so that you don’t have
different people coming in and funding different things? So that’s a challenge in
terms of coordinating the planning around national ownership, around planning
the links between the districts, the sectors, and the national level, and then also the
link to the sort of aid community and the donors. That’s not where it could be.
