Annual Reports

May PEACE Prevail in Sierra Leone!
May PEACE Prevail on Earth!

CADS Contribution to DFID Round Table Conference on the Paramount Chief’s Restoration Project held at the British Council in Freetown

The Center's National Coordinator, Mr. Brima Wagen Kamara attended a round table discussion on the Paramount Chief’s Restoration Project organized by DFID. The discussion took the following format. The chairman explained the rationale of the project and inputs were invited from the floor. The project was initially meant to provide shelter for 80 displaced paramount chiefs but along the line the scope of the project was widened to incorporate the Chiefdom Governance Reform Program. The implementing agents of the project to provide shelter for 80 displaced paramount chiefs succeeded in constructing 95% of the houses but mostly in the southern and eastern parts of the country. Naturally, NGO operators from the north were very bitter about the high concentration of the project in southern and eastern regions. The excuse the facilitators gave was that when the project started in March 2000, most areas in the north were inaccessible.

DFID had hired the services of a Review Team from the University of
Sussex. And it was this team that recommended to DFID for this Round Table which gave CADS the opportunity to make its input to this project, and the National Coordinator, Mr. Kamara was able to impress on conference participants the fact that not enough consultations were made with the rural people, a common mistake made by most implementing agencies. The project also did not take into consideration the cost associated with the local building materials-stones, sticks, sand, etc. They naively assumed that these materials would be provided by the local people free of cost -- again not enough consultation made with the rural beneficiaries of this project.

The round table was purely a consultative conference with participants drawn from all walks of life. But NGO practitioners were given high preference. CADS Coordinator had also recommended a genuine collaborative effort be upheld between DFID with NGOs operating at Chiefdom level.