News From PAB

New PAB Chairperson

Compiled by Manja Kamwi

Independent PAB member Ms Chilufya Kasutu was elected Chair-person at the PAB meeting 30th-31st March 2004.

Ms Chilufya Kasutu thanked all PAB members for the confidence given to her to continue as new PAB Chair-person in 2004 and was confident that the new PAB will contribute even more effectively and confidently to the development and more importantly implementation of the MS-Zambia policy paper 2002-06. Ms. Tafira Lubinda from Zambia Alliance of Women was elected PAB Vice Chair-person.

Monitoring Activities

Last year PAB developed a framework for monitoring and evaluating partner activities in order to ensure that they are in line with the MS-Zambia Policy Paper.

Partners found the tool useful and subsequently a checklist was sent to partners to fill in the M&E information. However, Programme Officer Charlton Sulwe reported that the Monitoring and Evaluation framework was a pilot one and so far there was very limited feed back from partners.

The reasons for limited feed back from partners were then discussed by PAB. It was concluded that partners did not yet have activities aligned to the policy paper dimensions of empowerment (WAPAC) and therefore had very little to report on achievement on indicators that were WAPAC based.

Country Office reported that review workshop were being conducted among all partners to ensure that the partnership activities and relevant partnership documents were in line with the Policy Paper intentions. This would also make it possible for partners to report back accordingly.

Annual Meeting 2004

Everybody agreed that the gender theme for the Annual Meeting 2004 was very relevant and interesting. However, to avoid the discussions to end at the Annual Meeting and sending out the report, it was agreed that there was need for more guidance on how to use this report by partners and PAB to discuss how to address gender and how to strategically take forward concerns on gender raised at the Annual meeting by partners.

Annual Meeting 2005

During the PAB meeting it was agreed that in groups the board should suggest a theme for the Annual meeting. The groups came up with the following proposals: HIV/AIDS, Democracy, Civil Education, Environment and Communication. A taskforce was put in place to facilitate the choosing of the theme for the Annual Meeting 2005 at the next PAB meeting.

Taskforces

During the handover independent PAB member Besinati Mpepo presented the taskforces and their purpose, which was to discuss various issues and advise the CO on how to respond to issues such as GMO and the Land Reforms.

Besinati Mpeopo noted that the taskforces could have done better than they actually did last year. In her suggestions for improvements, she said that the new PAB should look at the TOR, which were developed, and to build on them.

She suggested that each task force should prepare a work plan for the year and identify one or two issues and provide concrete advice to the CO in a particular component or cross cutting issue.

The taskforces are : Agriculture Management at Community Level, Community Based Natural Resources Management, Democracy and Governance at local level, Gender, HIV/AIDS, Civic Education, Training, Intercultural-Co-operation, Monitoring.