The Steering Committee
Delegates of the Nia Foundation; its Executive Director and Program Manager, have went to Dire Dawa this week to hold scheduled discussions with a technical and steering committees established earlier. The steering committee is comprised of the heads of the relevant sector offices (i.e. Mayor’s Office, Bureaus of Finance and Economy, Education, Health, Labour & Social Affairs, Women & Children’s Affairs, Government Houses Corporation, and Red Cross Secretariat) of the Dire Dawa City Administration and Nia Foundation mandated to closely work on the realization of the planned new Autism Center in the city.
The steering committee required a team of technical experts from all the stakeholders taking part and work on the details of the sector specific contributions and roles that would contribute to the hasten realization of the proposed Autism center. Accordingly, led by the Mayor’s office, the technical committee has met and discussed on the possible roles and contributions of each sector based on the forwarded sets of roles by the Nia Foundation. Apart from the major roles of all the sector bureaus on technically assisting the project and monitoring & evaluation the process periodically, the need for in kind, financial and most importantly mobilizing resources from potential partners in the city was substantiated and recommended by the technical committee.
The Technical Committee
The discussion outputs were meant to feed and inform the following scheduled discussion of the steering committee. Evaluating the suggestions made, the steering committee thoroughly discussed on the possibilities of the contributions and roles from the leadership point of view. At the end, general consensus was reached in terms of the extended roles that each sector need to play actively. The main point of agreement is that the City Administration to coordinate the process of mobilizing sectors’ contributions to produce synergy, and bring other partners on board from the government as well as the private sector for improved engagements & successful resource mobilizations in timely fashion.
At the end, both Nia Foundation and the City Administration has reinstated their commitment to the proposed initiative of establishing an Autism Center in the city with all the possibilities being there for the center to commence from the coming Ethiopian Academic year.
