More leaders, managers and supervisors in government and parastatal agenciesare following another series of training to boost their capacity and skills to make the activities of their organisations more transparent, accountable through good governance.

The productivity unit in the Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs in collaboration with The Guy Morel Institute (TGMI) are conducting the series of two-day trainings on transparency and accountability for good governance (TAGG) which kicked off yesterday morning and will be repeated for other groups of leaders on August 12 and 13.

Shella Mohideen, director of TGMI, and Mary-Vonne Francis, head of the productivity unit,are leading the training sessions.

When addressing the group taking part in the training, Ms Mohideen noted that accountability and transparency are two important elements of good governanceand that transparency is a powerful force thatwhen consistently applied, can help fight corruption, improve governance and promote accountability.

“Accountability and transparency are not easily separated, they both encompass many of the same actions, for instance, public reporting. The objective of these sessions is to improve service delivery in government and parastatal sectors in order to provide the best service possible and achieve the organisations’ objective,” Ms Mohideen stressed.

She added that these sessions will show participants that if they keep doing the same things over and over again they will not get different results, if they are not satisfied with the outcome of their work it is the duty of senior civil servants to do this reflection to produce better outcomes.

The training sessions also include chief executives and principal secretaries, and Ms Mohideen added that this is because in order to change the mindset of an organisation you need to start at the top.

She further added that on many occasions when these trainings are only conducted for lower management, the recommendations go unnoticed as the people in charge are unwilling to enforcethem.

For her part, Ms Francis said quality service should be at the forefront of an organisation in order to get the best results. She added that in the past she has noticed improvements and changes in various organisations after they attended the training, however there are still some areas that need improvement.

Christophe Zialor