Koforidua, Feb. 20, GNA - Fifty-eight area councils in the Eastern Region have been selected to benefit from 8.7 billion-cedi for the training of their councillors in leadership skills, participatory planning and management.

Each of the councils is to be granted 150 million cedis to develop the capacity of councillors for them to be able to draw up and implement local development plans in line with the decentralisation programme. Mrs Cedonia Dery, a rural institutional development expert attached to the Eastern Regional Planning Co-ordinating Unit, announced this at the opening of a three-day training of trainers' workshop for selected district assemblies at Koforidua on Monday. The workshop, the second in a series, which was organized by the Community-Based Rural Development Project (CBRDP) drew participants from 14 districts including planning, budget, community development and information officers.

Mrs Dery announced that each of the 17 districts in the Region were already enjoying a billion-cedis worth of infrastructure projects being funded under a 72-million-dollar World Bank Block Grant for a total of 60 projects between 2005-2008.

Opening the workshop, the New Juaben Municipal Chief Executive, Nana Kwasi Adjei Boateng, explained that the CBRDP, which replaced the Village Infrastructure Project (VIP), was aimed at improving the quality of the rural poor through increased transfer of technical and financial resources for sustainable development of basic village level infrastructure.

He said capacity building of the assemblies' sub-structures was part of strategies being implemented by the government to deepen the decentralisation programme. Nana Adjei Boateng reminded the participants that their contribution towards the implementation of the project would bring improvement in the lives of the rural folk as the nation strived to halve poverty levels by 2015.