The Regional Service Centre Entebbe (RSCE) Client Board Meeting held on 17 and 18 April in Entebbe was attended by Directors and Chiefs of Mission Support (D/CMS) for UN peace operations in Africa and the RSCE Senior Management.

RSCE Client Board, chaired by Mr. Ebrima Ceesay, DMS at United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), is the forum where the RSCE and her client missions discuss strategic matters of mutual benefit in a bid to improve cooperation and service delivery.

During this 12^th session, issues of importance that arose were pertaining to travel management, financial services, and client support.

As host and Secretary to the Client Board, Mr. Paulin Djomo, Director RSCE presented the strategic overview of the RSCE operations with impact on the missions and RSCE relationship. He focused mainly on the RSCE involvement in the Global Operational Support Architecture (GOSA), the Business Process Improvement Network, data analytics, vendor’s payment, and client relationship management.

“When it comes to the provision of services, our clients do not differentiate between the mission support and the RSCE. All recommendations taken at the Client Board are to engender more efficient processes and, In this context, RSCE is an extension of its Client missions as we continuously strive to deliver as one” he said.

Issues related to travel dominated the discussion. The draft travel resolution was analyzed together with its impact on the missions. The 16 days travel policy discussed one more time and how to improve the KPI in that area. The meeting made a few recommendations in the travel area and the Director RSCE will discuss with travel policy makers the challenge of raising duplicate travel requests in the system as well as keeping boarding passes for 5 years after the travel whereas all documents related to the travel including its approval is in the system. Supplementary to this, it was recommended for RSCE to conduct refresher training for Mission Travel and Shipment Approvers (TSAs) to reduce the lag in travel request and processing.

The Client Board also recommended that Global Procurement Support Section (GPSS) be more proactive in identifying and leveraging regional and local solutions to supplement procurement processes in the Missions.

The Client Board was appraised of the 2022 RSCE Client Satisfaction Survey deployed from 24th November to 23rd December 2022. The key focus of the survey was to assess the level of client satisfaction for RSCE services offered to Clients. The survey deployed in English, French and Arabic returned an overall satisfaction rate of 77.5%, representing 1.5% improvement from the previous year.

The meeting concluded with presentations from the Regional Field Technology services (RFTS) and Forward Support and Deployment Hub (FSDH).