ICMA Latin America will celebrate a decade of permanent presence in Mexico with a special session, !Funciona Bien!: Success in Mexico and How It Was Accomplished, on Monday, September 22, from 11:15 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in GRCC Room B12. Attendees will learn how ICMA members have promoted professional management and its practices during their past 10 years in more than 200 Mexican municipalities, with an emphasis on building institutional capacity. The session will highlight three examples of ICMA’s work in Mexico:

• In one example, attendees will learn about SINDES, an ICMA program in alliance with the Mexican Municipal Association (AMMAC). Based on ICMA's Center for Performance Measurement, the program has been in operation since 2001. ICMA will recognize those municipalities that have made special progress toward sharing their results with citizens and others, as well as those that have gone on to create commissions to follow up on the results.
• The second example features the municipality of Chihuahua, selected to share its experience with ICMA's institutional capacity-building programs. During the past five years, Chihuahua has made significant progress toward establishing institutional mechanisms to operate more effectively. Chihuahua was the first municipality to reach the second of five levels of an ICMA program called REFIM, which measures institutional capacity in four core areas: finance, planning, human resources, and legal framework. Only one other municipality, Puebla, has reached that level. Chihuahua has also built a strong performance measurement system called SIGMA, and recently completed a Mexican program that measures basic institutional capacities.
• The third example will focus on ICMA's alliance with the United Nations Global Compact Program, a program originally created for the private and social sectors, which, thanks to ICMA, is now available to the governmental sector.

To learn more about ICMA Latin America, please visit www.icma.org/latinoamerica or email Octavio Chavez at ochavez@icma.org.