17 January 2007
Provincial Reconstruction Teams Building Local Iraqi Leadership
Teams offer government coordination, training to make Iraqis self-sufficient
Washington -- Unlike other international aid programs operating in Iraq that focus on infrastructure projects, provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) are designed to expand the capacity of Iraqis to deliver essential services to their own people, helping to establish a permanent mid-level bureaucracy that will be able to respond to needs well after international assistance workers have gone.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Kuwait January 16 that success in Iraq needs to be built “bottom-up as well as top-down” and that Iraq’s decision to have a federal-style government made it “very, very important to build local leadership.”
She said that “in many ways” it is easier to work at the local level through PRTs to arrange the delivery of funds, goods and services from the central government, as well as to improve the structure and effectiveness of government through training.
The PRTs are designed to make local and provincial governments “capable of dealing with the day-to-day problems of the people where the people live,” she said, adding, “We think it's actually a pretty effective way of going about it.”
Part of President Bush’s new strategy in Iraq calls for expanding the number of PRTs in the country from 10 to at least 18. (See related article.)
Speaking January 17 from Baghdad through a State Department digital video conference, Joseph Gregoire, the team leader of the Baghdad PRT, said his staff of 80 civilian and military personnel is focused on capacity building. “By capacity building I mean engaging local Iraqi officials and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations … so that we can share with them our knowledge of policies, practices, procedures that can meet, support and sustain good governance.”
The PRTs' mandate is to help integrate the levels of Iraqi bureaucracies so that “in time, especially when we’re no longer there,” they can effectively operate a system that is “responsive to the local population,” he said.
Gregoire’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Ruch, said the term “provincial reconstruction team” is “a bit of a misnomer.”
“We are not a reconstruction agency. We’re reconstructing a government,” he said, adding that even that term is itself a stretch since as recently as one year ago, “we didn’t have provincial governments.”
PRT funds are focused on training and coordinating local, provincial and national governments to better meet the needs of their citizens. “It’s not so much about building schools. It’s about getting the steps in the process so they have a bureaucracy that can do this kind of work,” Ruch said.
In particular, the PRTs want to continue to train “those mid-level people who do the work in a government,” he said. “The leaders will come and go, but we’ve established a bureaucracy. They are the people who keep the government moving through time,” he explained.
As an example, Ruch said his PRT recently brought local Baghdad district leaders who wanted to build more schools together with their provincial council and Iraq’s Ministry of Education to discuss how to go about school construction. None of the three levels of government was previously making its own linkages, he said. Thanks to the PRT’s coordination, all three levels came up with a list of 10 schools to be built throughout the city, prioritized by need, to be voted on later in January. The PRT is also setting up a conference among the levels of government to establish future procedures for building schools in Baghdad.
Despite sectarian violence and its effect on the country’s politics, Gregoire said, his team has “not seen instances of sectarian criteria determining” the priority or placement of projects.
“You would be hard-pressed to look at where these projects are occurring, if you were to plot them on a map of Baghdad, and find any type of sectarian divider where things are actually being built,” Ruch said, since everyone realizes the need to work together. “You can’t make one part of the city great and leave another part of the city alone.” There is an understanding that “everyone has got to get something out of this government or they’re not going to succeed,” he said.
Besides helping local officials work through their provincial and federal governments, legal experts in the PRTs are also training Iraqi legal and law enforcement officials in the rule of law, and others on the team are providing vocational training to participants in the U.S. Agency for International Development’s microfinance programs.
Gregoire said the Baghdad PRT received $100 million in October 2005 and has already committed $70 million to various projects, with $40 million being used in projects now under way.
He acknowledged that “it will take a very long time to get to the point where the Iraqis will be able to meet the needs of the population independent of donor action.” But he said the PRTs were dispatched precisely in order to establish “the basis of that kind of development.”
For additional information on U.S. policies, see Iraq Update.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
