Oyo state government has charged technical desk officers to focus on projecting development in their activities by mainstreaming the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) into their development plans across its local government and council development areas.
This was part of the charge given to participants in a capacity building workshop organized by the state government for desk officers in the 33 LGAs and 35 LCDAs of the state.
The directors of budget, research and planning serve as desk officers of SDG at the Council levels across the state.
The capacity building workshop was flaged off by the Chief of Staff to Governor Seyi Makinde, Mr Segun Ogunwuyi at the Ibadan Business School, Bodija, Ibadan on Wednesday.
Speaking at the event, Ogunwuyi who was represented by the deputy Chief of Staff, Abdulmojeed Mogbajubola said the workshop was in line with the belief of Governor Makinde’s led administration in enhancing the capacity of workers to be more productive.
He said “Basically, the trend of things in Oyo is that the four pillars the government is leveraging on is: education, security, health and economic development taking cooperative advantage in the area of agriculture.
“But there is also something that the Governor Seyi Makinde led administration is doing so strongly, he is developing training and retraining the workforce of the civil service.
“Few days ago, we were at the International Conference Centre to train and induct the newly recruited teachers, that’s part of the thing. So, it’s about training the personnel at the local level so that productivity in Oyo state can increase.”
In an address at the workshop, the Senior Special Assistant (SSA) to the Governor on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), Mr Kunle Yusuf explained that since the current administration rely on logic, data and science in its policy formulation, training and sensitizing policy drivers at the council levels is necessary to ensure the grassroot keyed into the four pillars of development of the state which also correlate with the SDGs.
While urging the participants to always promote development in their councils, Yusuf noted that when technical officers are trained, they will properly support politicians to drive needed development.
He said “It is important to state that it is the first time that the SDG office will be training technical desk officers in all the LGAs in Oyo state.
“The reason is because this administration is driven by logic, data and science and that department of budget, planning and statistics is actually important to SDG and the reason we are training them is for them to understand the concept SDG and to mainstream the SDG into LG development plans.
“By doing so, we are encouraging them to allign the local government plans into state development plans and also encourage them to mainstream the SDG concept into development plans.
“We thank the governor for approving the capacity development workshop because they are policy drivers who are to train the technical people who will support the politicians and you will see development all across the state.
“SDG is about leaving no one behind on development. It means that from today, they should be projecting development in their various LGs. And the only way to do so is to allow the LGAs into the four pillars of this administration.
“The four pillars of this administration is encyclical in the 17 global goals of the SDG. Since SDG is about leaning no one behinde, we charge and encourage them to fit into the 17global goals of the SDGS, the 169 targets of the SDGs and 230 principles and indicators of SDG.”
Goodwill messages were equally received from a representative of the council bosses, and the statistician general of the state, Teslim Adekunle before the technical session of the workshop commenced.