By Mustapha Sesay
ActionAid Sierra Leone has held a four-day training workshop for Council Administrators and Civil Society organisations at the Companero Hotel outside Freetown. Aimed at strengthening public procurement the workshop drew participants from Bo District in the south and Bombali in the North of Sierra Leone. The organisers say it was a part of their commitment to enhancing transparency and democratic good governance in the country especially with procurement being regarded as one of the main conduits of corruption in Sierra Leone. According to the Governance Coordinator of ActionAid Sierra Leone, Christian Lawrence, the training was part of a two-year project on deepening and monitoring public procurement geared towards empowering civil society organisations and other stakeholders within the two districts on monitoring public procurement. He said the workshop was the second phase of the project and that his organisation had been specifically partnering with HOPANDA which is a network of CSOs in Bo and with Women Action for Human Dignity (WAHD) in the Bombali district. He said they had targeted Bo and Bombali because of the importance they attached to the two districts in terms of politics and the allocation of funds to their two councils which he said were the largest in the country. During the training sessions the head of Public Procurement Monitoring and Evaluation of the National Public Procurement Agency told participants that around 85% of public funds were being misused through procurement-related malpractices. Mohamed Jameru Musa said this did not mean that the staff were eating the money but that they were awarding procurement contracts to those lacking in expertise. (C) Politico 24/09/13
