INTENT
Vibrant and visible local institutions constructively engaged with governance and development in order to adapt and thrive in a changing globalised world.

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE
To strengthen the capacity of local institutions, leaders and citizenry / communities to constructively engage in development and to increase their say / voice in development discourse at all levels.

RATIONALE
Uganda through legal and self-help citizen frameworks has a plethora of governance and development institutions from the grassroots to the national level. These institutions include the extensive Local Government structures and leadership; professional bodies; community-based  organisations;  National  Non-government  organisations;  faith-based  organisations;  youth,  farmers  and  women  associations, among others. These institutions and leaders should be enhancing effective service delivery, citizen engagement and amplifying citizen  voices with the overall improvement in good governance and development of Uganda.

There is however still a big gap between the numbers of institutions and leaders viz a viz the quality of participation, service delivery and governance (National Governance, Peace and Security Survey [NGPSS], 2017; National Governance Baseline Survey [NGBS], 2014). This is mainly due to limited capacity in terms of knowledge, skills, behavior, culture and infrastructure from both the supply and demand side.

STRATEGY
Our strategy is to strengthen the capacity of local institutions, their leaders and citizenry to enable them engage more constructively in governance and development processes at local, national and international level.

This will be done through:

1. Leadership training and development aimed at improving the leadership of the different local institutions, women and youth structures;
2. Facilitating networking, benchmarking and partnerships building within and outside the local institutions;
3. Conducting Civic education aimed at increasing enjoyment of human rights, increasing civic participation and active citizenship;
4. Increasing the local institutions capacity for resource mobilization, project planning, management, monitoring and evaluation;
5. Supporting the emergency and sustainability of local voices through evidence-based advocacy aimed at pro-active participation in decision making and accountability processes.
6. Supporting local communities to put up, expand and maintain infrastructure needed to spur development and good governance. This may include physical infrastructure like buildings and or non-physical infrastructure like ICT systems.
7. Facilitating constructive dialogue between the local citizenry and other actors in the governance and development process including but not limited to local institutions and leaders, national institutions and leaders, and international institutions and leaders.
8. Strengthening the capacity of existing institutions (like Professional bodies, Local Governments, FBOs, CSOs, Farmer groups, youth and Women Associations etc) to engage in governance and development.