Fifteen staffers of the Directorate of Technical Cooperation in Africa (DTCA) are on training to improve their capacity in Project Management using a €74,000 grant it secured from the Netherlands.
The training, which begins on Aug. 5 and ends on Aug. 10 in Abuja, is expected to make the 15 trainees understand the difference between projects, programmes, portfolios, and methodologies for project implementation as well as why methodologies are selected.
Mr Abubakar Abdullahi, the Managing Principal of the Front Office ng, (a Management and Consultants Organisation on Project Management ), said that at the end of the training, the beneficiaries would have an understanding of reasons projects are conceptualised and why they had a way of ending prematurely bearing in mind its scope and budget.
News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the 15 staffers comprise the second batch of trainees for the capacity building programme.
NAN further reports that the first batch of 10 beneficiaries of the capacity building programme was trained on Food Security and Fisheries for sustainable economic development of the Lake Chad Basin in Lagos from July 29 to to Aug. 3.
This makes a total of 25 beneficiaries that have been selected by the directorate for the capacity building training.
Abdullahi said that the trainees would implement what they would learn in the course of the training while playing their organisational role in the directorate.
On his part, Mr Kevin Yilme, the Assistant Director, Programme Management, DTCA, said that the trainning involved technical officers and staffers from the project management, information technology, and diaspora departments of the directorate.
He further said it was the first time the DTCA is organising a foreign government-sponsored training, adding that some staffers had travelled out in the past to India, Singapore, and Australia for training.
“Our mandate is to facilitate the rapid development of Africa through the instrumentality of the Nigerian Technical Corporation Fund (NTCF) and the Project Management Training would help in project delivery.
“The NTCF is a $25million (USD) fund created by the Nigerian Government from the Nigerian Trust Fund and this fund is like a ‘catalytic Fund’ you use to spur other investment,” he said.
He also said the DTCA had executed projects across the 54 African countries in areas of Agriculture, Climate change, entrepreneurship and capacity building, amongst other thematic areas.
Among the projects, he mentioned a Rwandan road project for infrastructural development, a climate change project in South Africa, and scholarships given to African students in Sudan, Cameroon, Liberia and Sierra Leone to study in Nigerian universities .
He said scholarships were awarded based on how they are applied for.
“DTCA has funded projects with the Nigerian Export Bank (NEXIM), which is called the Sea link project, because there ‘s a lot of trade going on in the West African coast up till Central Africa by water and there is no specific shipping vessels plying these routes for both human and material cargo,” he said.
He, however appealed to the Netherlands Government for their continuous support to the DTCA saying it would increase it’s capacity to the delivery of its mandates and rapid industrialization of Africa.
