A two-week workshop organised by the Ministry of External Relations and the Commonwealth held in Yaounde.

Senior officials from professional institutions, State-owned universities, some ministries and state-owned corporations ended a two-week seminar last Friday 23 November 2012 at the National School of Administration and Magistracy, ENAM. The over 50 participants sub-divided into two groups, had a week each to receive training in administrative drafting in English.

The resource person for the seminar was Anthony Rossiter, an expert in the domain hired by the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. Anthony Rossiter who is former Director of Studies at the Royal Institute for Public Administration, London, UK developed much of the work on the Administrative Drafting Manual and organised two other workshops on the topic in 2010 and 2011 in Cameroon.

Both groups had the opportunity to discover the "Manual on Administrative Drafting in English in Cameroon's Public Administration" produced by the Ministry of External Relations in collaboration with the Governance and Institutional Development Division (GIDD) Adviser for West Africa, Commonwealth Secretariat in London. The manual contains salient topics such as: Features of Administrative Drafting, Standard Letter Format, Circulars, Reports, Briefing Notes, Summaries, Minutes of Meetings, Note-taking, Speech-writing, Application Letters, CVs, Recommendation Letters, Memorandums of Understanding, and Invitation Letters, among others.

The closing ceremony was chaired by Tanda Robert, Director General in charge of Consular Affairs at the Ministry of External Relations who represented the Minister of External Relations, Pierre Moukoko Mbonjo. The Director of ENAM was represented by Mrs Asa'a Mambo, Technical Adviser at the institution, while Mrs Oluwatoyin Job, Director of West Africa at the Commonwealth Secretariat stood in for the Organisation.

At the end of the training, each participant was given two copies of the manual for their respective heads of service while they all expressed the desire to see Administrative Drafting in English introduced as a module in all professional schools in Cameroon.