The Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) has concluded a one-day stakeholders meeting to review its working document developed to ensure citizens participation in governance and fiscal responsibility.
The review of the existing document was held at the Hotel Seventeen in Kaduna and attracted key stakeholders from state and non State actors.
During the review, the existing document was made available to those present and their input were democratically adopted by participants.
In an interview with newsmen on the sidelines of the review, Tech Lead Developer/Programme Manager of PPDC, Vershima Tide explained that the review became imperative, to ensure all stakeholders input was captured to make the document more encompassing.
“We have realized the need to do our work based on evidence, which led to us doing the research.
“it is also important that gathering evidence has all stakeholders to get need their input. We needed to include all stakeholders to make collate their input to make it accurate to the best level obtainable and ensure every input is included as well,” he said.
Speaking further, he explained that with the review, they are expecting that this would help to have a more comprehensive report, which will help them have a more suitable product at the end of the day that whatever is captured and published at the end of the day will be input of stakeholders Involved in the process not just that of PPDC.
“We at PPDC are working to have more citizens participation in governance. Through that process, we have realized that fiscal transparency is key to ensuring improved service delivery.
“Doing this research, the idea is to find out what goals exist and how other stakeholders can contribute to meeting the goals.
“This will help to support non state and state actors and the goal is for us to improve service delivery and the lives of Nigerians,” he added.
According to him, the stakeholders invited to the review include goverment and non state actors.
“We invited key stakeholders, we also mapped out civil society organisations, media and other members of the public working to ensure fiscal responsibility,” he said.
When asked if the project was taking place in only Kaduna State, he explained that three other states are captured as a pilot s heme.
“We are not doing this only here, we are doing this across four states, Kaduna, Ekiti, Anambra and Akwa Ibom,” he revealed.
According to him, the goal is for them to scale up this kind of work to other states in the country, as a pilot scheme.
On how they are being funded for the project considering the fact that it comes with a huge financial burden, he said that they are currently being supported by the McArthur Foundation.
Highlighting the achievements recorded so far by the PPDC, he said that they are excited that stakeholders and those they identified as respondents have been open to speaking to them, providing what he described as rich content and practical steps to take to meet u their goals.
“For the challenges, not everyone has been able to speak with us, we still believe there are more missing voices. This is just a sample size, if we had been able to speak to more people, got more init, the research would have been richer,” he added.
Adamu Yusuf, kaduna