The Inter-American Development Bank launched its first regional course on development effectiveness this week, which will provide training for career officials from 12 Latin American countries.
The course is part of the IDB’s PRODEV program to strengthen the capacity of borrowing nations’ governments to improve the efficiency of their public spending and evaluate the effectiveness of their action.
Under PRODEV, the IDB’s Development Effectiveness and Strategic Planning Department (DEV) and the Inter-American Institute for Social Development (INDES) organized a four-week program of courses on development effectiveness.
The first session’s participants are mid-level officials from finance ministries, planning and budget offices and internal revenue services from Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay
IDB Executive Vice President Dennis Flannery said at the opening ceremony that this course represents “an initial effort that is part of the Bank’s broader strategy to strengthen management for results in the region, where human resources training plays a central role.”
DEV Manager Manuel Rapoport said: “We must work closely to improve development effectiveness, and this course offers us an outstanding opportunity because it will allow us to share and learn from a range of experiences.”
Nohra Rey de Marulanda, manager of the IDB’s Integration and Regional Programs Department, noted that the INDES is making “two major contributions to training for development effectiveness: the experience it has accumulated over the past 10 years and its network of alumni, which has become a forum for discussion and exchanging experiences among development practitioners in Latin America.”
The course covers subjects such as monitoring and evaluation, management for results, budgeting for results, models for public administration, public policy formulation and management and the role of multilateral agencies in promoting public sector effectiveness.
The trainers include faculty from the universities of Georgetown, Maryland, New York, Pittsburg, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and ESADE of Spain, as well as specialists from the INDES and various IDB departments.
Similar courses will be carried out over the next three years for officials from countries in the Southern Cone, the Andean Region, the English-speaking Caribbean and Central America and the non-English-speaking Caribbean.
PRODEV is a fund established as a program of the Development Effectiveness and Strategic Planning Department to finance technical cooperation to strengthen governments in the region and help them achieve better development results.
The INDES, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, provides training for public sector officials and civil society leaders involved in the management of public policies and social programs in Latin America and the Caribbean.