Capacity Building Project for Efficient Management Planning and Territorial Development of the Province of Dajabón

The Dominican Republic has achieved impressive economic strides during the 1990s and in 2010 it joined the group of middle income countries.  This growth is due to tourism development driven mainly by foreign capital, which has had little positive economic impact on to rural development.  Rural municipalities, especially those that border Haiti have populations of less than 10,000 inhabitants, have only a handful of employees.  Moreover, most of the staff change along with the mayor after the elections held every four years.  In addition to the dearth of institutional knowledge, there is almost no staff training to strengthen local government capacity for formulating and implementing development plans.  With only half of the original allocation of the national budget towards municipal development plans that reflect the needs of its residents it was impossible to enable a truly community driven development.

Under these circumstances seriously affecting municipalities, JICA commissioned a project with the aim of strengthening the capacity of formulating and implementing development plans of municipalities and create a support mechanism sustainable for municipal councils. IC Net was then asked to strengthen the capacities to formulate and implement municipal development plans with community participation and establish processes to enable budgetary allocation medium and long term for Dajabón province of public investment projects.