By Asmau Ahmad
The United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF), has met with its implementing partners in Kaduna State to strengthen interventions in health, nutrition, water, sanitation, hygiene and education.
Chief of Field Office, UNICEF Kaduna, Mr. Uptal Moitra, said the goal is to accelerate the realisation of the rights of all children and women to survival, development, protection and participation.
Mr. Moitra explained that the mid-year review meeting was necessary to assess achievements and constraints on planned result for 2016 to ensure better performance.
He said: “We want to document lessons learned from implementation experience to help accelerate progress for the most disadvantaged children.
“We want to identify constraints, challenges, bottlenecks encountered in the course of implementation and how these were addressed or arembeing addressed to accelerate achievement of results.”
Moitra added that the state level planning and review was introduced in 2014 to properly address peculiar needs of children and women, saying the 2016 mid-year review was combined with planning meeting form 2017 because of the need to align UNICEF planning with that of government at the Federal and State levels.
Our correspondent report that at the end of the day, the mid-yearn report would summarise achievements against planned results orboutputs, constraints and challenges experienced, lessons learned, including good practices, innovations, partnerships, and recommendations.
Also speaking, the state Commissioner for Health and Human Services, Dr. Paul Dogo, said that far reaching steps are being taken by the state government to strengthen its 2016 budget implementation.
“One of the best practices we have learned from UNICEF is having reviews such as this and fortunately, reviews are gradually becoming a part of us. So far, such review is helping the state to ensure better performance in what we will be doing in next six months. It’s really of good advantage for us,” Dr. said.
