Netherlands and Sana’aUniversity to train civil servants [Archives:2005/830/Community]
By Aziz A. Alhadi
For the Yemen Times
Just because the future is known only to God, that does not preclude searching for it. Toward this end, and in line with the Dutch saying “Learn to look beyond your nose,” Yemen held its second successful “Future Search” workshop last week.
The venue on this occasion was Taiz, where Sana'a University held a distance workshop under the theme “Toward Modernizing the Civil Service.” The workshop was sponsored through Sana'a University under a multi-million euro package of support from the Netherlands Programme for Strengthening Institutional Capacity in Education and Training (NPT).
This programme currently funds some 12.6 million euros for full-circle institutional capacity development at six public universities around the country.
This workshop launches a program which will oversee development of training leading to an Executive Master's Degree in Public Administration, geared exclusively toward Yemen civil servants at the mid-to-high levels of the bureaucracy.
The project envisions extensive cooperation and coordination between the Ministry of Civil Service and Insurance, the National Institutes for Administrative Sciences and Sana'a University's Department of Political Science through its Public Administration Unit.
The “Future Search” framework has proved successful in the past where it was utilized by the Higher Education Project.
It's been used toward development of strategy for a Master Plan to install IT capacity, including administrative systems for Yemen's public universities and three community colleges.
On this occasion, Dr. Yahya Motaher of Sana'a University, Project Coordinator for the MPA project, along with his Dutch counterpart, Dr. Sander Dankelman of the Dutch Institute of Public Administration (ROI) organized the program to include maximum participation of a wide range of specialists and stakeholders to help in the development plan.
To help, organizers called in a renowned expert Dr. Han Rakels, a specialist in the Future Search framework to facilitate the discussions. In addition, two senior specialists from the ROI, Marc van den Muyzenberg and Angela Kwok, along with two professors from the University of Leiden, Prof. Frank de Zwart and Prof. Frits van der Meer complemented the participation.
According to the chief architect of the project, Drs. Han Blom, the program envisions becoming linked to a merit-based system for the Civil Service.
As an indication of the importance placed on these discussions by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the Ministry of Civil Service and Insurance, the Yemen government also sent very high level participation in the four-day workshop. The participants included all the deputy ministers of the Civil Service Ministry, senior officials and select technocrats from across the public sector and education leaders from Sana'a University and NIAS, among others.
The Minister of Civil Service, Mr. Hamoud Al-Soofi, opened the workshop emphasizing the crucial need to develop focused training linked to “the defined needs” of Yemen's civil administration.
He also stressed the need to ensure effective coordination between his ministry, NIAS and Sana'a University, and pledged full support for the effort.
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