The Emergency Community Development Project (PUDC) is a Regional Bureau for Africa Flagship project which aims to reduce poverty and growing inequalities between regions by providing rural communities with basic socioeconomic infrastructure including in some cases health and education facilities.� Additionally, the PUDC supports both central and local governments as well as communities to build their systems and capacities in development planning and procurement. The first PUDC started in Senegal where UNDP delivered over USD 200 million in a three-year period followed by Togo in 2016 which is currently ongoing. While the PUDC did provide impactful results on the ground, UNDP Country offices faced several issues related to risk management, operations, audit and resource mobilization. With several countries in West and central Africa signaling interest in discussing with UNDP a PUDC like model (i.e. Chad, Burkina Faso, etc.).

In order to better support country offices in designing and implementing PUDC, the Regional Bureau for Africa has set up a task-force to provide necessary guidance to Country offices on how to engage governments, how to assess and manage risks, how to assess the operational needs to develop and how to analyze and engage donors to raise funds for the programme. One major attribution of the task force is to conduct a thorough review/evaluation of the PUDC implemented in Senegal and Togo to inform the bureau management as well as the concerned CO management and government partners about the overall achievement of the programmes, the best practices and lessons learnt. The findings of the evaluation will also be used as evidence when designing new programmes in the continent. Furthermore, the review/evaluation will serve as negotiation and communications tools with government partners, donors, private sectors, civil society organizations, media and beneficiaries to showcase comparative advantages of UNDP managing the funds on behalf of the Government.