Vice President Teo attends the Expert Group Meeting on Transparency in Land Administration: A Human Capacity Building Agenda for South and South East AsiaYogyakarta, Indonesia, 19-22 July 2010
Transparency in land administration (TLA) is the first and foremost training program that the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) has been implementing in cooperation with the Training and Capacity Building Branch (TCBB) of UN-HABITAT and the International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. This joint activity was hosted by the Department of Geodetic Engineering, Gahjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. FIG was represented by Vice President CheeHai Teo. A training program, comprising a Training Toolkit and Trainers’ Guide, was developed and implemented in Sub-Sahara Africa. The implementation of the training program in that region in 2008 entailed running four successive training programs. Each of the four courses on average attracted about 30 participants. All in all, the program trained 114 change agents recruited from 19 countries. Of these, 41 were women. UN-HABITAT has launched a training of trainers’ (TOT) program in the Asia Pacific Region, South and South East Asia in particular, using the Training Toolkit and Trainers’ Guide that was developed earlier. However, the training will incorporate region specific content and methodology. The UN-HABITAT Human Capacity Building Agenda for South and South East Asia on Transparency in Land Administration was kicked off with an Expert Group Meeting (EGM) to identify these sub-regions’ specific land sector governance challenges and priorities. The EGM included presentations by resource persons aimed at contextualizing and embedding TLA training in broad land governance concepts and principles, on the state of TLA in the region as well as insights into human capacity building in TLA with emphasis on opportunities and challenges. The EGM confronted issues of governance and transparency in the land sector, the participants discussed current capacity building initiatives and identified capacity gaps in these sub-regions. The task then was to translate the identified needs into training sessions, decide on case studies and then design, develop and implement training workshops that would sensitize land administrators and other stakeholders, develop their capacity to tackle issues of transparency in land administration and reduce corruption in the land sector at the two ToT workshop in Hanoi (for Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Philippines and Vietnam) and Kathmandu (for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). The Expert Group Meeting (EGM) gathered participants from Indonesia, Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. In addition, resource persons from Malaysia and FIG were also invited together with those from UN-Habitat and ITC, University of Twente. During the Opening of the EGM, Vice President Teo congratulated and thanked on behalf of FIG the United Nations Human Settlement Programme; the Global Land Tool Network and the University of Twente for this important and timely initiative for South and South East Asia and remarked that FIG look forward to contribute appropriately at the EGM. Later that day, he made a presentation titled “Opportunities to Enhance Land Governance in South and South East Asia”, and participated and contributed at each of the breakout sessions and discussion time. Read more:
TEO CheeHai 22 July 2010 |
