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Initiative on the provision of local public services

The efficiency of public action has always been a primordial theme for the Alliance. As far back as July 2002, when it launched a process to create an African Charter for Legitimate Governance, the Alliance pointed out the need to think about and come up with proposals for more suitable and efficient means of providing basic public services to improve the living conditions of each and every citizen. Painstaking work on the issue led to the conclusion that, in order to anchor State institutions in society, one requirement was a wider offering of public services based on proximity.

In fact, over and above the somewhat reductive theses linking public services and the fight against poverty, the Alliance places the issue of public services provision in a much wider perspective of rebuilding governance. Because they provide a real and efficient response to populations’ concerns, public services are seen as a strategy for renewing the rules that govern the national public space and links between actors, as well as a means to revitalise the post-colonial African State.

So the Alliance set up and conducted a specific project on the provision of public services within the framework of the ‘Governance, decentralisation and local development’ group. This initiative group responds to the need to make use of the local level—always in the perspective of rebuilding governance in Africa—because of its potential capacity for linking actors, modes and systems of governance. Its goal is to help consolidate and spread decentralisation and local development processes initiated on the African continent.

The initiative on basic public services, an outgrowth of work done for the African Charter for Legitimate Governance, aimed to make a more in-depth study of public services and governance to produce, in the end, concrete proposals for change likely to influence the logic behind supplying services and their current modes of provision to populations.

In keeping with the tri-fold ‘action-reflection-action’ process underpinning the Alliance’s work, the initiative organised the collection of experiences in four local African communities: Commune VI in the Bamako district of Mali, the city of Lomé in Togo, the city of Port Novo in Benin and the Nioro community in Senegal.

This collection of experiences took place in cities…

Read more Presentation of the initiative on the provision of public services

A project initiative Governance, local development and decentralisation

Production of the initiative: Managing liquid wastes – Managing waste – Local public health – Using waste

Managing liquid wastes

5 Experiences sheet

Managing waste

25 Experiences sheet

Local public health

9 Experiences sheet

Using waste

18 Experiences sheet