As part of its contribution to learning and knowledge sharing, the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) The Gambia, on Tuesday held its annual conference at the Sun Beach Hotel in Cape Point, to provide a forum for partners and stakeholders to discuss and make recommendations on emerging development issues and challenges.

The theme for this year's conference was "Funding Development Programmes- A Paradigm Shift".Speaking at the occasion, the country director of VSO The Gambia, Haddijatou Lamin Njie, said that, the  theme concerns all developing nations, including The Gambia. According to her, despite numerous efforts by the government of The Gambia and development partners to meet the PRSP II and MDG targets, mobilising resources to cover the 64,000,000 USD annual funding gaps remain a challenge.

She disclosed that ,in order to meet the PRSP targets by 2011, and the MDG's by 2015 there is the need to reconsider  the development financing landscape. "We need to think out of the box and come up with innovative approaches to meet the targets that we all signed up to" she added.She also expressed hope that the forum will be utilised to increase awareness on international development funding, identify available resources at the national and community level as well as share tools and techniques for mobilising development funds to support a result-oriented implementation of  developmental programmes.She finally thanked the participants for responding to their call.

This was followed by presentations by Dawda Jawara Gaye the Project Manager of the Project's Coordination Unit at the ministry of Basic and Secondary Education, Momodou Touray of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Nyakassi Jarjue, the director of Nova Scotia-Gambia Association (NSGA) on International Development Funding, National Resource Mobilisation and Community Resource Mobilisation respectively.