Stakeholder Workshops Draw Lessons, Propose Actions

L to R: Ron Royal, President of Esso Chad; H.E. M. Nasser, Chad’s Minister of Petrol; Rashad Kaldany, World Bank Director of Oil, Gas, Mining and Chemicals; Noël Tshiani, World Bank Country Manager for Chad at the opening Plenary Session in N’Djaména.

Issues and themes

Discussions in both countries focused on specific aspects of the project, namely,

• Technical issues, including oil production and sale
• Economic impacts and private sector benefits
• Institutional and supervisory components
• Social and environmental dimensions, and
• in Chad, a session on the revenue management program.

  Conference Documents

  Overall Summary

  Summary of Chad Workshop

  Summary of Cameroon Workshop

The workshops also underlined shared themes, including the importance of better communication and information-sharing and the strengthening of local institutional and civil society capacity. Participants also called for developing entrepreneurial competitiveness and focusing more on the needs of affected local populations.

Measure progress and gather lessons

The workshops were organized within the context of the project’s Implementation Completion Report (ICR).The ICR, which evaluates the project’s design and achievement of objectives, is delivered to the Board of Directors and is used by the Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department. It marks the end of disbursement of the credit, but in no way implies the end of the Bank’s involvement in the project.

Unlike the ICR, however, the workshops were not a project evaluation. Instead, participants searched for concrete lessons from the implementation of the construction phase in order to offer recommendations for improving the continued execution of the project. These lessons were meant to augment the ICR as well as aid in the design and implementation of other, similar World Bank projects.

Input from participants

Members of Cameroon’s  Pipeline Steering and Monitoring Committee (front row) learn from their neighbor's experiences at the well-attended workshop in N’Djaména.

They also said that better analysis of the country’s capacity level before beginning the project would have improved the effectiveness of the related capacity-building projects.

In addition, stakeholders felt that the national bodies responsible for coordinating the project should report to the highest levels of government, such as the prime minister or president, to facilitate inter-ministerial coordination. This would apply to Chad’s National Coordination on the Petrol Project (CNPP), which reports to the Ministry of Petrol, and Cameroon’s Pipeline Steering and Monitoring Committee (CPSP), which reports to the National Hydrocarbons Company.

…and from each country

Other ideas that emerged in  Chad were:

• Extend the Environmental Management Plan to other oil extraction in the country, and maintain an external monitoring mechanism for the project’s environmental and social components
• Intensify communications to local populations
• Improve public finance transparency and discipline, including more information about oil revenue spending.

In Cameroon, attendees proposed:

• Creating university training programs to allow nationals to take advantage of the project’s employment opportunities
• Doing economic and capacity baseline evaluations before undertaking projects of this size, to help evaluation later
• Creating a platform of information exchange between the country’s Pipeline Steering and Monitoring Committee, the private sector, and civil society, and
• Developing government/institutional capacity as much as possible before the project begins

In both countries, civil society groups were uneasy about the compensation program’s execution and finalization. Concerned that the ICR marked a closing of the project, these groups asked for continued World Bank involvement in and supervision of the project in the coming years.