Ramallah – November 13, 2011 The Goal of this project is to prepare plans for the strategic development of Sawahreh Asharqiah, Beddo and Qetanna areas for the period from 2012 – 2015. The methodology followed in the preparation of plans used community participation in all stages of work. The project aims to make positive and important changes in the relationship between local councils and community organizations to enable self-reliance in formulating decisions and future plans, and thus to create a sustainable development at the economic, social, political, environmental level, etc.
The project came within the continuing efforts to develop and enable the Palestinian communities, through the Municipal Development and Lending Fund in consultation with municipalities and the Ministry of Local Government. IDMC provided technical support during all stages of preparing development plans and strategies.
Methodology used in preparing development strategy depended on the employment of strategic development planning tools adopted by the Ministry of Local Government.
In order to regulate the role of people and institutions of the community in active participation in the project, a number of working groups was formed to lead the planning process and participate to get the wanted results, these committees has participated – with the support of the IDMC consultants- in providing the necessary data and information, strategic analysis, identifying development priorities and develop the vision, goals, development indicators, and descriptions of projects, and others. The committee members participated in all meetings and discussions to express opinions and put forward innovative ideas for preparing development frameworks in their towns.
Many important outputs have been achieved through this project which can be summarized as follows:
1. Diagnosis of the thematic areas of development including economy, environment, security, culture youth, and others.
2. Determine development priorities.
3. Developing a framework for the development strategic towns which included a vision and development objectives.
4. Preparation of strategic development plan which included programs and projects intended to be implemented within the plan, as well as a monitoring and evaluation plan.
It must be emphasized that this process for strategic development planning reflects the best models and practices in the field, so the results of this effort from the analysis, strategies and strategic plans are all based on real community participation and concrete facts and ideas that can be applied to development of towns. Therefore, this planning effort will lead to:
1. Adoption of the plans to be the basis on which financing of projects would be made.
2. The distribution of development burden to all organizations of the community making it easy to follow and ensure their implementation.
3. Establishing a mechanism for monitoring and evaluating outcomes and taking corrective action required which again promote teamwork and ensure the highest degree of implementation of the plans.
