Members of Parliament gathered in large numbers on Tuesday to hear about the achievements of LIFT’s Village Development Programme (VDP) and debate the way forward. With LIFT’s technical assistance and financial support to the village development planning and township budgeting work of the Department of Rural Development (DRD), the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation (MoALI) has reached one third of Myanmar’s rural townships.
The event in Nay Pyi Taw brought together Government representatives and parliamentarians, providing an important platform for exchange of views and experiences from across the country. The highlight was an engaging and frank panel discussion with active audience participation. MPs brought up challenges faced in villages, such as fraud cases, capacity constraints in villages, efficiency of monitoring and evaluation and the need for better operational guidelines, manuals and mechanisms.
Addressing the Members of Parliament, U Khant Zaw, MoALI’s Director General of the Department of Rural Development, highlighted key impact of the VDP initiative: “Myanmar needs balanced development and agriculture is the backbone of our country. VDP has taught DRD staff and local communities how to optimise available resources and to handle challenges and problems. Through the participatory and bottom-up approach, they have felt ownership of the programme, which has led to accountability and cooperation between departments.”
LIFT’s Fund Director Katy Webley underlined the importance of the Village Development Programme in demonstrating the feasibility of bottom-up planning. “Through the development of tools and processes, the VDP programme showed that it can be done.”
The panel included DRD’s Director General U Khant Zaw, Myanmar Development Institute’s Senior Operations Specialist Thi Dar New and LIFT’s Rural Development Specialist Kyaw Naing. Chaired by U Yan Lin, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of Agriculture, Livestock and Rural Development, the panellists talked about the importance of involving the villagers in decision-making and promoting transparency.
Senior Development Planner U Khin Win and Kyaw Naing outlined the VDP’s approach and achievements during its implementation in 8,175 villages in 99 townships. In addition to touching several sectors, VDP is centred on human development through a “train the trainer” approach. The LIFT Technical Assistance team has trained more than 570 township DRD officers in 235 townships, who in turn have trained 17,350 Village Resident Planners, two in each village, to collect wide-ranging data which is used in defining medium-term village development plans, creating a true bottom-up approach.
VDP’s Senior Strategic Advisor Shafiquer Rahman urged for a scaling up strategy, “because people in other villages or townships cannot wait for five or ten years.” LIFT Fund Director Katy Webley noted that upscaling the programme would depend on the Government developing a clear policy directive for bottom-up planning and, given the multi-sectoral nature of village planning, identifying a clear institutional home and cross-departmental approaches.
