By Aruna Lahai, Public Education Officer
The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), through the Project Coordination Unit of the Commission, has organized a three-day training of community monitors on the roles and responsibilities of the ACC in the Social Safety Net (SSN) beneficiary targeting and enrollment exercise.
The training was hosted in Makeni for participants from the Western Area, North-West and Northern regions; and in Bo for participants from the Southern and Eastern regions, of Sierra Leone. The training ran from 2nd to 4th March 2022.
From the two training locations, 235 community monitors participated in the training, which focused on defining the role of the Commission, especially the community monitors, in the SSN Project implementation. It further discussed the strategy the ACC team could employ in order to strengthen the overarching monitoring role in the implementation of the SSN Project with the ultimate goal of ensuring efficiency and effectiveness in the SSN project delivery.
The Coordinator for the ACC Project Coordination Unit in his address to the participants emphasized on the importance of community monitors in helping the ACC carry out the monitoring role and in getting project feedbacks from communities and beneficiaries.
Patrick Sundufu Morovia advised participants to give their full time to the exercise since they will be required to take a test at the end of the training. As volunteers working for the ACC, the Project Coordinator went on, community monitors will be considered as public officers in accordance with the Anti-Corruption Act 2008, as amended in 2019. Based on this, every community monitor will be required to sign a code of conduct guiding the SSN Project implementation, he said.
The Deputy Commissioner of the ACC, Augustine Foday Ngobie, made a tour of the two training venues in Makeni and Bo where he acknowledged the good work of the community monitors, adding that the successes gained so far by the ACC in carrying out the monitoring role in the SSN Project is as a result of their combined efforts. He encouraged the community monitors to keep doing the good work which is highly recognized by the ACC top Management.
At the end of the training, the participants took a test which will serve as a benchmark for the selection of 221 best performing community monitors to work with the ACC Project Coordination Unit in the forthcoming targeting and enrolment of 35,000 SSN beneficiaries across the 16 districts.
The National Commission for Social Action (NaCSA) and the other project partners (ACC and Statistics Sierra Leone) will design a work plan for the targeting and enrollment of 35,000 beneficiaries followed by the payment of cash to the enrolled beneficiaries.
The SSN Project,
commonly called the “Ep Fet Po Project”, was launched in 2014 to establish core social protection systems and
progressively expand the coverage of cash transfers to extremely poor
households in Sierra Leone. It is financed
by the Government of Sierra Leone with support from the World Bank and UNICEF
