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Africa Horn | ||||
AU warned it faces donor fatigue as mission reviews budget | ||||
2017-03-03 | ||||
Senior African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) officials met in Nairobi on Tuesday to review its activities and draw up a budget that will guide the operations of the mission in 2017. The five-day conference which has drawn participants from the African Union (AU) will come up with a detailed plan and budget. The Special Representative of the AU Commission Chairperson (SRCC) for Somalia Francisco Madeira said the meeting will go a long way in helping the mission achieve its objectives. “This is where we are going to plan in detail what each of our units and clusters is going to do or intends to do in the years to come,” he said in a statement issued in Nairobi. Madeira said the pan-African body’s mission is finding it increasingly difficult to fund a number of programs, owing to what he called donor fatigue. “Not all project plans could be implemented, either because we dreamt so much and thought we could do everything and thus lost so much sight or we trusted our partners so much that we thought they would fund everything,” he said.
“Donors think stabilizing Somalia is a task of the African Union so they get fatigued. Donor fatigue shouldn’t arise. It’s the duty of all of us to make Somalia a functional state. Let’s be partners,” he said. Among issues being discussed at the Nairobi meeting include support for political processes, security sector, stabilization and recovery, protection of human rights and gender process.
The new Somali government has developed a National Development Plan AMISOM Force Chief of Plans Salifu Yakubu painted a security atmosphere that is fluid, largely due to the unpredictability of the situation. Al-Shabaab, he noted, has been weakened but still has the capacity to attack. This militia “remains resilient” and has resorted to asymmetric warfare. | ||||
Posted by:Steve White |