Workshop for Aimag and Districts’ CRH Secretaries

October 5, 2020

Room 208, National Academy of Governance

Opening Remarks by Ms. Nashida Sattar

Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP Mongolia

5 October 2020

National Academy of Governance

Good morning, Distinguished Secretaries, Ladies and gentlemen.

One of the founding pillars of democracy lies in ensuring strong, active, and fair representation of the people at decision-making levels. It is also an integral factor to make governments more responsive and accountable to citizens at all levels including youth and marginalized groups.

As Mongolia faces the extraordinary challenges of Covid19 pandemic, many, specially marginalized groups, are suffering dire consequences. As Secretaries of the Citizen’s Representative Hurals, you have a profound duty and responsibility to address the issues you are facing at local government levels and work toward improving the livelihood and resiliency of your local communities to build forward better.

For greater accountability and transparency, it is essential that laws provide clear separation of functions at different tiers of the government, with distinctive clarification on decision making powers of local authorities. The pending revision of the draft Law on Administrative and Territorial Units and Their Governance or LATUG in the Parliament would be instrumental in addressing this challenge. Strengthening Representative Bodies in Mongolia project provided substantial support in the draft revision through organizing thematic consultations nationally and regionally ensuring voices and opinions of all the stakeholders were heard.

To strengthen the capacity of the representative bodies in Mongolia, the project has trained over 8,000 local hural members including 2,000 women leaders and 1,600 bagh hural chairpersons since 2017. Moreover, the staff members of aimag and district hurals were trained jointly with National Academy of Governance.

Together, we have achieved remarkable results since 2016 in strengthening representative bodies in Mongolia as we approach closer to the 2020 local election. To sustain and carry on this progress, your roles in training your new colleagues and helping them learn effective and informed ways of performing their duties will be more important than ever.

UNDP Mongolia is confident in your commitment to carry on the torch and successfully institutionalize the training methodologies, manuals, and knowledge products through close collaboration of the Parliament Secretariat, the Cabinet Secretariat, the National Academy of Governance, and most importantly, utilization of the Local Governance Research, Training, and Information Center at NaOG.

Lastly, I would like to thank Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation for generously funding the project as well as their commitment to strengthening representative bodies in Mongolia and the Parliament Secretariat for your committed partnership in implementing the project.

Thank you and I wish you all a successful workshop.