Date:	14-19 March 2005

Eighty-five top and mid-level officials from local, regional, and national entities in Colombia with mandates in the City of Bogotá (Capital District) and the State of Cundinamarca participated in the training course in regional development management held from 14 to 19 March 2005 in Bogotá. The course focused on institutional capacity-building for collaborative management and is the fifth under the project "Building Institutional and Technical Capacity for the Integrated Regional Development of Bogotá-Cundinamarca." The project is designed to create a Regional Planning Board (RPB) to strengthen cooperative efforts between Bogotá and Cundinamarca to promote the social, environmental, and economic development of their territories, and make the region more productive and competitive.

The UNCRD-LAC Office supports the RPB as its technical secretariat and by designing and implementing a training programme to build institutional capacity for an integrated and collaborative development of the region. The training package has included the development of four training courses, workshops, forums, study tours, and a programme for the diffusion of the results obtained during the process via a website and other events. The events had around 3,000 participants, of whom roughly 150 are public officials of the RPB who had attended the training courses.

Continuing the training programme, the LAC Office organized a 6-day training course in cooperation with the partner institutions of the RPB with the main objective of building capacity among RPB officials for the joint/interinstitutional development of the regional agenda 2005-2008 - the main focus of the project. The training served to promote the continuity of the project within the new local administrations that took office in January 2004, acquainting participants with the process, outputs, and current status of development of the RPB project. It also enabled them to learn lessons from relevant practical experiences (national and international) and exchange knowledge, experiences, and ideas with public officials of the other RPB entities. The training, ultimately, was to develop abilities and tools for a joint/collaborative formulation of an operational plan and monitoring system for the implementation of the Bogotá-Cundinamarca regional agenda 2005-2008, specifically on regional productivity with emphasis on sustainable tourism, mobility, access to basic social services with focus on drinking water, water resource management, habitat, and institutional development/regional governance.

The training faculty was composed of staff members of the LAC Office, consultants, officials of the RPB entities, and national and international experts from Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).