UNITED CITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS OF AFRICA (UCLGA)

Institutional/ Organisational Development (OD) 

Ref: OD3 Resource Mobilisation for the UCLGA Network  

The UCLGA family of local governments is managed through a network comprising national and regional associations of local governments and the Africa secretariat. The Africa Secretariat interim office is situated in Tshwane, Republic of South Africa. Its primary role is to implement the decisions of the General Assembly and Executive Committee. It ensures that the UCLGA’s Business Plan is implemented on the basis of Annual Work Plans. The Africa Secretariat is headed by a Secretary General.  

At the regional level, there will be a secretariat to be established in one of each region’s member country.

At national level, it is anticipated that a national association of local governments will be established in each country.

The UCLGA is a membership organisation, depending primarily on its members’ contributions for financial sustenance. The base of the network’s membership are the local governments, both urban and rural, across the continent of Africa. Thus, local governments ultimately contribute to the sustenance of the national, regional and continental levels of the network. 

The role of the UCLGA is to assist in the strengthening of local governments and their associations as means to improve local governance and service delivery through appropriate and sustainable local policies well articulated to national and regional policies and through capacitating local government institutions to carry out their mandates. The successful fulfillment of this role requires substantial resourcing.

Local governments in Africa are still very weak, most still grappling with seeking to satisfy the most basic needs of their citizenry. While member local governments must show commitment and contribute to the sustenance of their own organs, they nevertheless require substantial external support until sustainable growth is realised.

This project, thus, seeks to explore and harness all options for resource mobilisation in order to create useful and robust local government supporting organs at national, regional and continental levels.  

The project seeks to carry out the following:

1. Undertake an aggressive membership recruitment and retention campaign and strategy.
2. Establish funding relationships with development partners and donors.
3. Engage international donors and development partners in deliberations aimed at increasing financial support for African local governments.
4. Engage international and national donors and development partners to collaborate with the UCLGA in undertaking its programmes.
5. Promote the adoption of donor and partner support terms and conditions that respect national policies of their national governments and be seen to promote respect for organisational constitutions, organisations’ resolutions, corporate governance and the rule of law.
6. In the spirit of the Paris Declaration, develop an integrated reporting and information sharing system to track the deployment of development resources to avoid duplication, exploit synergies and maximize their impact.