Hull-Freetown Good Practice Scheme
Hull, UK and Freetown, Sierra Leone, have a well established relationship (they've been twinned since 1980) that has birthed a number of projects over the years.
In early 2010 funding was secured from the Commonwealth and Local Government Forum to see officers from the two city councils working together on improving contract and Public Private Partnership procedures.
Ultimately we hope to develop, and deliver, a waste strategy for Freetown using the insights gained from the recent launch of Hull's new waste strategy. Arriving at this point will take a number of months and requires the foundations to be laid before tackling the 'nuts and bolts' of a similar waste management strategy for Freetown.
Therefore, the initial focus of the project is on developing skills in procurement, asset management and contract monitoring & performance for the Sierra Leone context. These areas will underpin future good practice across Freetown City Council and allow the project to have a longer term impact beyond waste management.
The project's goal of delivering value for money and transparency in the commissioning of services, with a particular focus on water, sanitation and waste management is shared by European Union sponsored activity in Freetown. 6 million Euros was made available in May 2010 for this purpose which will have provided support to the existing international development actors working in this area. It is important that the Good Practice Scheme contributes towards Freetown City Council's capacity to support, and engage, with these other projects as coordinator and commissioner.
In order to aid communication the two partner councils are exploring the use of web technologies. Email is relied on heavily, but this can lead to complications in teams based in one location, let alone those separated by hundreds of miles. Taking inspiration from work taking place within British local goverment, officers are bringing some of the ideas found in the 'web 2.0' movement (such as wikis, threaded messaging and document sharing) to aid our collaboration. To do this we are using the Drupal Content Management System and an installation profile called Open Atrium which has been developed for the World Bank.
Team blogs