PESHAWAR, June 16: A two-day workshop for the capacity building of local nazims, naib nazims and secretaries of union councils on accounting and performance auditing was started here on Wednesday.

The workshop has been jointly organized by the Essential Institutional Reform Operationalization Programme (EIROP), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, ARCON and Sanjh Development Foundation, was attended by nazims, naib nazims and secretaries of union councils from Town-I and Town-II.

On the occasion, the trainers briefed the participants on technical aspects of accounting and performance auditing and how to maintain ledgers at union council level.

They said the training was in line with the widely felt need for creating requisite skills and motivation to improve planning and utilization of developmental funds provided to the local governments.

They maintained that accounting and performance auditing was an area that was technical in nature and therefore required a concentrated and professional training programme that enabled the local level governance structures to understand an essentially specialized subject in a way that was logical and facile for non-financial personnel.

"This need assumes greater importance in the context of the National Reconstruction Bureau's capacity building aims for local government pertaining to the new district budget codes, revenue mobilization and development planning," they observed.

The participants were informed that a total of 95 workshops were planned for all the districts across the NWFP, with 24 training locations at district headquarters. For organizing the workshops, the province has been divided into four geographical zones.