The Work and Employment Community collaborates with the Ministry of Rural Development to create an internal government network for district collectors working to implement the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The Work and Employment Community has addressed a variety of critical issues concerning the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in different states. During the Community’s Visioning Workshop in May 2006, participants identified three areas for action on NREGA specifically looking at ways to strengthen the workforce community and the management capacity of local stakeholders, and also ways to improve critical processes.

Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) felt there was need for a mechanism to link state secretaries and district collectors from the 330 NREGA districts to identify bottlenecks/areas for improvement, share best practices, provide solutions to implementation problems and commission measures to address them. It Working together with UNDP and Solution Exchange, the MoRD decided to create an internal government network of district collectors to discuss issues related to the implementation of NREGA. As part of this action project a unit for “Knowledge Networking/Action Research” will be added to the project implementation cell, the Community will promote sharing of knowledge and experience on NREGA and help set up a NREGA network to address its constituents’ special needs and also commission action research to look at these issues and feed the results into ongoing scheme as appropriate. A moderator for the NREGA network was identified in mid-2007 and the network will launch in January 2008.