To ensure the sustainability of the support the programme is giving to civil society organisations (CSOs), 11 Capacity Development Providers, made up of government training institutions, privately owned training centres and academic institutions have been partnering with ACT to sustain capacity development services to CSOs in Nigeria.
The Centre for Management Development (CMD), a government institution, has been one of the long-standing partners since 2020. To appreciate the strategic relationship and seek commitment for future support to CSOs, representatives of the ACT programme paid courtesy visit to the management of CMD on 31st August 2022, at their head office in Abuja.
Commending the tenacity and cooperation of the centre for the success of the partnership, the National Programme Manager of ACT, Damilola Babalola, remarked that CMD has been present and available 100% of the time they were needed for capacity support and other strategic events. He noted that their availability illustrates the magnanimity of the leadership and their understanding of the importance of supporting civil society organisations to deliver on their mandates.
The Component One Manager of the ACT Programme, Hafsat Mustafa, recognised how the management of CMD has contributed towards sustaining the efforts of the ACT programme. She emphasised that the centre is better positioned to accommodate the e-learning platform that ACT is supporting to build, to the advantage of CSOs and greater visibility of CMD.
In response, the Director-General of the centre, represented by the Director, DG’s Office, Dorothy Esiri, appreciated the confidence placed on CMD by the ACT programme. She added that the centre was actually mooting plans to expand into e-learning, and that the platform introduced by ACT is timely, strategic and embraceable.
According to her, “We continue to have an advantage to partner with the programme even as the Act of Parliament establishing the centre, as amended in 2022, now mandates CMD to not only provide certification for trainers and accreditation for training centres, but also to sanction individual and institutional defaulters in order to sanitise the training system in the country. The training programmes provided by the centre exposes trainees to professional networks of personnel, knowledge transfer, pedagogical skills and diverse training methodologies.”
