Training vital to raising efficiency and effectiveness - Amb. Leonard N Iipumbu

I am delighted to welcome you all to the first CEO Colloquium of the SADC Development Finance Institution Network convened by the SADC DFRC. This is an advanced Management Development Programme directed at us as Chief Executive Office of the Network with the purpose of giving us an opportunity to discuss strategies and policy issues of development finance with experts in the field in as far as they relate to our institutions, and to carry out an introspection of how they are working to meet stakeholder interests at the institutional and personal level.

As is apparent from the establishment of the Network and its DFRC, and their successful and commendable operation over the last ten years or so, training and development of management and staff is vital to raising the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization, and enabling it to meet its organizational mandates.

I am pleased to note that a lot of our members of staff have, over the years, attended DFRC training programmes in both technical and support areas for the DFIs, and have, I believe as a consequence contributed significantly to boosting the operations of our respective institutions. While I applaud this success, I caution against complacency. Rather I emphasise the need for a renewed and sustained drive for innovative capacity building at all levels of our institutions to fine-tune our skills further. The world is changing, technology in leaps and bounds, clients are becoming more demanding, and development imperatives ever more pressing.

Let us all welcome the decision to convene this programme, because even as CEOs, we need to continually sharpen our knowledge and skills to understand our environment and the internal workings of our organizations. Our environments are continually changing and turbulent, and stakeholders (government, board, financers, etc) interests loom large and may shift from time to time. At the same time, we must steer our teams of skilled and knowledgeable and dynamic management