Southern Synods of Ethiopia

The Capacity Building Project was implemented 2005/2007. The overall aim of the project was to improve the quality of the project cycle management by building the capacity of the church's Development And Social Service (DASSC) structure in Southern Ethiopia and provide professional and technical backing to facilitate the implementation of the NLM supported projects/programmes as required by the back donors and the Ethiopian government.

The ideas behind the project have been mainly carried out as planned. Reports are coming more and more in time and they are more correctly composed. The accounting is mainly presented at time - but to obtain this there is an ongoing and good communication between the CBP and the projects. There seems to bee a much better understanding of the need of this timely reporting. There is set up a calendar for the yearly project cycle.

The probably biggest challenge for a sustainable change is the heavy turnover in the different posts at the projects and also in some Units. Another challenge is the education level of people working in the projects. The most difficult seems to be to follow up the calendar for reporting, changes of budget and new requests at time and reporting concretely about what the project has executed last year. There is still a need of follow up here.

An eventual further integration with the DASSC structure should be studied over the next year or two years to see how the new DASSC structure with Area Coordination Offices will find its final form.