Alchevsk Prepares for Strategic Planning

Alchevsk Deputy Mayor Lyudmyla Solovyova welcomes workshop participants

A team of three USAID LED project experts conducted a workshop in Alchevsk, Luhansk Oblast, last week to acquaint relevant local government officers with the analytical phase of strategic planning process.

The goal of the event, held at request of the city, was to transfer the knowledge of how to prepare analytical materials underlying strategic planning efforts. In the first place, this was done to facilitate so-called environment scan that is part of the economic development planning process, which is about to commence in Alchevsk with assistance from the LED project. Furthermore, this knowledge will enable the city management to do the same independently in various other areas, such as health care, education, utilities sector, social protection, etc.

Participants in the workshop included key local government officers that will be responsible for data collection, handling, and analysis, as well as representatives from the Alchevsk Development Fund, founded by the Industrial Union of Donbas (IUD) corporation.

Alchevsk Deputy Mayor Lyudmyla Solovyova in her welcome word mentioned that the workshop was held in pursuance of the Memorandum of Cooperation signed between the city, USAID and IUD on Sept. 14, 2007.

LED Advisor Anatoliy Solovyov provided an overview of the strategic planning process, dwelling upon community profile – an analytical paper containing "hard data" on a city, which is often referred to in Ukraine as "community passport." He explained what it is and why it is important to have a high-quality community profile not only for the purpose of strategic planning but also for the community itself, the city government and businesses, and potential investors.

Communications specialist with the LED project, Oleksandr Zheleznyak, addressed technical details of community profile data handling using an Excel-based tool developed under the project. This part of the workshop included practical training in creation of charts and their export to Word documents.

Business attitude survey was the topic of presentation made by Natalia Boyko, independent local consultant. She described the procedure of polling managers of local enterprises, showed an example of what the final product would look like, and explained how the survey findings could be analyzed in strategic planning.

It is expected that Alchevsk will launch strategic planning for local economic development on Nov. 20, 2007, when the Alchevsk Mayor will convene an Expert Council formed with the purpose of preparing an Economic Development Strategic Plan. Part of this introductory meeting will be the signing of a Letter of Intent between the city and the LED project.