Burundi

On Thursday, July 24, at the Salon of the Ministry of Municipal Development and with the presence of H.E. Dieudonné GITERUZI, Minister of Communal Development, of Mr. Agostinho ZACARIAS, Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme in Burundi, of Mr. Xavier Michon, Country Director of UNDP in Burundi, of international cooperation representatives and decentralized cooperation partners, it was officially signed the Framework Programme PACTE for Human Development in Burundi.

The ceremony was an opportunity to inform the press not only about the technical aspects of the Framework Programme but also and especially, about the political implications of this important agreement between UNDP and the Government of Burundi.

The PACTE Programme is part of the vision and national strategies of the Government of Burundi concerning decentralization and local economic development, as well as the strategic framework of UNDP in Burundi to promote a process of community recovery towards sustainable local development that can lead economic growth, social equality, construction/peacebuilding and environmental protection at the local level.

Through the Territorial Pacte, the communities of the targeted territories will participate in committees of discussion, planning and implementation of pilot experiences of local development. The committees will represent the hyphen between the territories and the various levels of intervention, i.e. the National one, represented by the Ministries and sectorial services, and the international one, represented by international and decentralized cooperation actors, in order to communicate and advocate for the specific needs of the communities and exchange knowledge and experience on the practices of local development.

The opportunity was seized by H.E. the Minister to mark the milestone that the launch of this new development strategy in Burundi is, with the support of UNDP and of all UN agencies in Burundi gathered in the framework of a joint inter-agency program to be launched in September 2014 and that sees in the PACTE project an essential component that leads citizens at the heart of the process of peacebuilding and identifies in participatory local governance the key to achieve sustainable development.

Further information on the programme and the ongoing activities will be published soon.