The merger between ICRAF’s East and Southern Africa (ESAf) regions is part of a restructuring programme that seeks to not only facilitate operational efficiency, but also streamline the organisation’s activities in the countries represented.
This move will see the ICRAF offices in Kenya become the headquarters of administration and finance activities in the expanded region that will include: Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda and the newly established Southern Africa Nodal office in Malawi which will oversee similar activities in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
This emerged during the recent five-day orientation and refresher training meeting for administration and finance staff drawn from the respective country offices that began on 3 March 2014.
Speaking during the function, Dr. Jeremias Mowo, ESAf’s Regional Coordinator expressed confidence in the new structure saying that this plan was focused on promoting service delivery while accelerating regional growth in line with ICRAF’s mandate. On her part, Rose Onyango, the Regional Administrator called on staff to be active participants in executing their roles which she listed as: providing required support to scientists to enable them focus on their core competencies, serve as the main source of information to the scientists and provide vertical and horizontal support to both scientists and the administration.
During the training, participants were taken through various aspects of management including: managing payroll systems, budget codes and the role of budget holders, managing contracts and grants, proposal development and the various techniques that can be adopted in a bid to standardize operational efficiency in the country offices.
The training is part of an annual exercise that seeks to develop skills among staff and also align activities in country offices to organizational policies. A similar meeting was held between 24th and 28th of June, 2013.
