TWENTY four trainees from 17 African countries are now joining a 10-day course co-sponsored by the Local Administration Ministry and the Egyptian Agency of Partnership for Development (EAPD), a Foreign Ministry affiliate, designed to qualify African cadres operating in the fields of local and decentralised development. Featuring lectures and panels on such vital topics as promoting food security, water resources management and countryside development especially in light of Egypt’s Decent Life presidential initiative, the training course that kick-started the other day points to the wide horizons of co-operation between African countries in areas of direct relevance to common efforts for the realisation of sustainable development especially as so envisaged under Africa’s Vision 2063, the continent’s parent instrument for developmental action. With Africa enjoying considerable availability of diverse natural resources, the qualification of human cadres who can steer and undertake developmental action augments moves to promote and spread development-oriented partnerships across the land of the continent.
An equally significant advantage of the training course is that it helps optimise the continent’s common benefiting from its human resources – all the more so given the fact that young people constitute almost one third of Africa’s population, now estimated to exceed 1.4 billion according to the latest UN data. And there are projections that by the year 2050, Africa will become home of one quarter of the world’s aggregate population. Such a large base of human resources, existing and forecast, certainly requires due training in order to become more of an effective asset for sustainable development than a burdensome element in the pursuance of national and inter-African development plans. Emanating from this understanding, the arrangement of training courses for development workers facilitates the actual process of launching joint projects.
One more advantage of the recent training programme is that it takes into consideration the vastness of the lands of many African countries – a factor which demands expanding the geographical reach out of developmental action. Honing the skills of African cadres operating in local development fields also implies building a capacity to overcome population overgrowth repercussions through effective management of developmental action. In a wider perspective, making all components of sustainable development, including trained and qualified human resources, available to African countries acquires additional importance in view of the current challenges Africa is facing, including in the foremost the need to effectuate economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and the necessity of forging efficient mitigation and adaptation programmes regarding present and foreseeable repercussions of global climate change. In dealing with either challenge, the availability of duly-qualified and trained development workers would boost national and continental capabilities through professional performance and fine management—two key benefits of training courses.
In addition to reflecting Egypt’s genuine orientation to promote multi-faceted co-operation with other countries of Africa, the training courses organised by the EAPD represent a tangible contribution to the enhancing the needful capacity-building at the level of the continent. Launched in 2014 by merging the fund for technical assistance to African countries and another fund for technical co-operation with the Commonwealth of Independent States, the agency has notably managed to diversify the areas of training so that they can suit the continent’s common developmental needs; hence the recent addition of such areas as food security and local development steering to its established programmes to qualify cadres in the fields of healthcare, agriculture, education, the judiciary and diplomacy.
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