Civic Education is one of the six Programme components of the Good Governance Programme of the Government of The Gambia. The National Council for Civic Education (NCCE) Act of 1998 places responsibility on the Council which is independent and non partisan for sensitising, informing and educating the citizenry, particularly at the grassroots, about their rights and responsibilities under the Constitution. The Council focuses on ensuring that the mass citizenry has the basic capacities for active participation in their governance, as well as for other development activities in the civil society agenda. Such capacities include programmes for promoting civic knowledge, skills and dispositions which should be used by the Citizenry in their Local Governance, and in negotiation with various Organizations.

The Civic Education Programme is designed to address the Civic Education needs of diverse groups such as office workers, youths, women, children, the disabled and the poor to ensure a democratic state characterized by transparency, accountability and probity. Generally, the focus of the programme is on the following ten interrelated themes: The Constitution, Citizenship, Democracy, Rights and Responsibilities, Government, Governance, Decentralization, Patriotism, conflict resolution, and National Security together with critical contemporary issues.

The Council has a strategic plan, which recognizes not only the importance of partnerships but also the need to clearly identify the locus of each partnership. Accordingly, within its partnership strategy, the Council works with a twenty-member multi sectoral taskforce, which enables it to collaborate with agencies at policy level, and to interface and network with them at programming and implementation levels.

The strategic plan also has inbuilt monitoring and evaluation strategies with clearly defined indicators that have been tested for relevance, performance, impact and measurability. A recent evaluation exercise indicates that Gambians are gradually understanding the basic principle and practices of democracy, their rights and responsibilities and progressively developing participation skills. The programmes is also enabling Gambians to understand and to establish organic relationship between democracy and development, thus enabling communities to contribute to the formulation of strategies that can ensure equitable development. This is enabling the poor to secure greater participation in programming interventions, which is also leading them towards building institutions, and opportunity structures that are more accessible to them. Increasingly, the creation of awareness of rights and responsibilities is shifting matters from the centre to the periphery and responsible well-being is now defined less for people, and much more by the people themselves through social analysis and dialogues.

The National Council for Civic Education uses a multi media approach to deliver messages. The most commonly used are Radio and Television, Folklore Drama, Face to Face encounters through Campaigns and workshops. Although the electronic media has greater potential for reaching more people its usage is constrained by the inability to obtain timely feedback. The use of Folklore Drama on the other hand has being found to be particularly useful in sustaining the interest of participants.

Some of the activities accomplished since the year 2002 are reflected in the table below:

The programme was evaluated in 2002 by an independent evaluator. The valuation report indicated that the programme was well received. However it also observed that the programme needs to meet the criteria of comprehensiveness to be more participative and broad in scope. The council inline with the major recommendations of consultancy report designed a strategic plan, which is focused on objectives, and themes with a well articulated plan of action and implementation schedules with appropriately defined delivery system and modalities. The programme is now fully participative and all encompassing with adequate and realistic resource, financial and material resourcing indicators. BACK