Along with awareness raising, numerous workshops, seminars, focus group discussions, talk programmes, policy debates and orientation programmes have been held with municipality, CCI staff including representatives of civil society in Kathmandu and also in partner municipalities. This has helped in the capacity development of stakeholders in the concerned areas regarding the concept of PPP in Nepal.

The various training programmes conducted (lasting from one to five days) covered subjects like public relations, negotiation and leadership, proposal development and project financial analysis in order to build the capacity of the stakeholders from a PPP perspective both at the central and local levels.

Representatives of stakeholders were also taken on exposure visits to international practices in PPP in neighboring countries (Chennai, India; Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand) which increased their practical understanding of PPP.

Inter-municipality visits to observe PPP initiatives and encourage replication have also been effective for gaining on the ground knowledge of PPP. These visits have been organized both centrally by the PPPUE Project Management Office as well as individual municipalities.

Human Resources Development in PPP PPPUE has adopted a long-term policy of popularizing and enhancing PPP knowledge and subsequently developing human resources by partnering with national academic institutions like the Local Development Training Academy (LDTA), National Administrative Staff College (NASC), the Institute of Engineering (IoE), Pokhara University and the National Judicial Academy. Apart from providing training packages for different target groups,LDTA and NASC have included PPP in their standard

training curricula. Similarly, the IoE offers PPP for credit in its MSc in Urban Planning course. Another important achievement in human resource development is the training of local PPP focal points of partner municipalities as resource persons for local PPP training activities.

A PPP resource center has been established with PPP related books, reports, magazines and other reference materials open to all PPP practitioners, researchers, students and others at the PMO in Kathmandu. Similar resource centres are planned in selected partner municipalities.