United Nations Radio

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Organization for Migration, IOM are joining forces to recruit technical experts from the Somali diaspora to help rebuild key governance structures in the country.

Somalis with professional expertise in policy and legislation, human resources management and public financial management living in North America, the UK and Scandinavia will be asked to return for an average period of six months. They will provide on-the-job peer-to-peer training in their respective fields in northern Somalia initially. IOM's spokesperson in Geneva, Jemini Pandya:

"There will be six expert missions, initially, but UNDP, which is funding the programme, is eventually hoping that between 200 to 300 Somalis over three years will be deployed to the three geographic zones of Somalia, including Somaliland."

Ms. Pandya says better management of public finances is just one of the areas that need to be urgently targeted given that decades of conflict have left an almost entirely informal economy with a lack of most of the structures needed to handle donor inflows, collect taxes, pay security forces or even to maximize the potential of the estimated one billion US dollars in remittances the country receives each year.

For UN Radio, I'm Bissera Kostova.

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