Developing a soum mid-term economic development strategy

Project Location within Country: 4 soums of Arkhangai, Bayankhongor, Uvs and Khuvsgul provinces

Professional Staff Provided by your Company:
No of Staff: 3

No of Person-months: 45

Name of Client: The Open Society Institute (OSI) & the Open Society Forum (OSF) in Mongolia

Start Date:
April 2006

Completion date:
October 2007

Name of associated firm(s) if any:
No

No. of Person-Months of Professional
Staff Provided by Associated Firm(s):

Name of Senior Staff (Project Director/Co-ordinator, Team Leader) involved and functions performed
Dr. Erdenebaatar, Team Leader, Centre for Policy Research

Detailed Narrative Description of Project:
The overall objectives of the proposed OSI/OSF in-house project are to encourage local communities towards initiating multi-faced consultative dialogues and cooperation amongst public and private sectors in developing feasible economic development strategy to be implemented through locally owned programs and projects.

Detailed Description of Actual Services provided by your Company:

• Capacities of local administrative and business stakeholders for the design and implementation of a local economic development strategic plan based on public-private partnership built through 3 workshops were for the soum teams organized to introduce the methodology of local economic development strategic planning and two consultative meetings of the soum Governors held to discuss the progresses of the project
• Technical support and methodological guidance to local public institutions and private entrepreneurs towards strengthening capacity to identify and prioritize directions that would consolidate the local resources towards future growth of local economy in environmentally-friendly ways provided
• Review compendium of current knowledge on participatory strategic planning of local economic development by international donors and national bodies undertaken
• Completed a questionnaire soum business enabling environment survey (LBES) in all 4 soums of the target aimags, namely Arkhangai, Khuvsgul, Uvs and Bayankhongor followed by an enhanced competitiveness SWOT analysis.
• Primary and secondary data on the latest socio-economic development of the soums along with aimag and national secondary data collected and analyzed to determine the baseline indicators for the follow-up evaluation and monitoring purposes.  
• The findings of the LBES and SWOT analysis through various data processing techniques processed and converted into a draft of a mid-term economic development strategy.
• Produced a “Vision-goals-objectives-programs-projects” matrix as the platform structure of the strategy to be developed
• A number of stakeholders’ consultations were held to discuss the key issues of the soum economic development strategy
• A soum economic development strategy was developed and printed out in Mongolian and English
• A donor forum to introduce the strategies was held for attracting locally-operating and other national investors through creative public-private partnerships and for selling to potential donors and international investors/funds
• Undertook extensive public awareness promotion activities in project soums and aimags using the local mass media