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state, ‘I need my water, I need my electricity, I need certain things,’ and ‘the local authorities,
councils… institutions that deliver services are those that need capacity building, serious
capacity building, and institutional formation and also practice of doing.’”
Implementing partners also encouraged a focus on democratic governance at the local level,
particularly given the 2012 local council elections caused turnover in the district councils; “At
the district level, when the new councilors come then [programming] needs to start afresh.
They need to have new trainings, new capacity building because all of capacity has left.” One
implementing partner argued:
I think what will be quite important in practice, especially in terms of the
governance, is not just talking about sort of work with civil society and talk about
accountability, but really working with governments and working with them to
become stronger. I think a lot of times, even civil society and donors were quite
quick to criticize their government and say they have a weak capacity, they can’t
do this...In the last 20 years, I think has been really focused on building capacity
of civil society and not so much on governance… maybe it's not really about
funds and giving them so much money, [but] building their systems, building their
structures, having experts there that come work with them, exposing them to other
systems and how they can work to become more effective. Even exposure if it’s
through other - I don't know - ways that they can work and ways that they can be
more effective and accountable to people and so on. We place a lot of this on the
civil society, so I think I've seen exposure visits for civil society. I've seen
numerous training for civil society. I don't know if there is, but I haven’t seen so
much for government.
Civic and Voter Education
A few donor representatives raised support to civic and voter education as a priority and an
emphasis was placed on pursuing alternate means of conducting civic education than has been
done in the past. Two donor interviewees proposed that basic civic education be
“institutionalized in the educational curriculum,” as it is not taught in Somaliland schools.
These donors explained that assistance could be provided to develop the civic education
curriculum that would be taught to young Somalilanders by their primary and/or secondary
school teachers. Two implementing partners also suggested this approach, with one explaining
that this methodology has been recently utilized in Puntland where a teacher’s guide was
developed. The other implementing partner explained:
[Civic education is] usually done during the time of elections which is quite short.
So they would say the election is going to be in November, maybe a month or two
before. And then all the civic education is done during that period. What we’re
thinking is maybe to do more concrete civic education on curriculum maybe
throughout the year. Then you have it in primary education or in secondary
school, something like that, so people are aware of these things, their rights and so
on from an early age in education.
Finally, a donor prioritized supporting civic education for rural communities as opposed to
urban areas, which have been the target of previous civic education initiatives for “a decade or
more now.”
