AKPABUYO – Mrs Theresa Ezima, a programme desk officer, has attributed poor monitoring of projects to inadequate funding.
Ezima is the Desk Officer of the Community-Based Natural Resource Management Programme in Akpabuyo Local Government Area of Cross River.
She said this on Monday when the Supervision Mission team comprising the officials of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Federal Government visited projects in the area.
“Lack of funds affects the smooth running of the programme at this level of the local government council.’’
Ezima said that the Commodity Self Monitoring Group set up by the State Programme Office had ceased to function due to the lack of incentives to members.
According to her, there are three major community-based groups engaged in various projects — Ikot Ekpo-Eyo (piggery), Uruandok group (vegetable) and Idebe (oil palm nursery).
Meanwhile, the State Programme Officer, Mr Innocent Ogbim, confirmed the lack of payment of counterpart funding by the nine local government councils of the state implementing the programme.
Ogbim said that the local governments had not paid their counterpart funds in the last five years of N86.4 million yearly.
“That is N9.6 million every year per local government for five years; that is a huge amount, and this has really affected the implementation of the programme at that level.
“As for the state, they have paid up to 2012; the state is only owing for 2013.’’
He said that going by the structure of the programme, the local level played a very critical role of monitoring the activities of the communities.
The programme officer said series of meetings had been held with the council authorities with promises to pay up that were never fulfilled.
A consultant to IFAD, Mr Paul Schoon, however, observed that most of the officers at the local government area level needed more capacity building on data gathering and information sharing.
Paul said that the data collection and monitoring method by the field officers at the local council level were not satisfactory, adding that this could impact negatively on the programme.
“I think institutionally, there is still a lot of work to be done.
“It is unfortunate that government institutions do not really carry out capacity building to be able to do what they need to do.’’ (NAN)
