Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

456 Salvatore Schiavo-Campo
The main priority is therefore to review the division of labor between
the two ministries—allowing the Ministry of Development Planning to
concentrate on its core competence of investment programming by relieving
it of responsibility for aid management, which should be moved to the
Ministry of Finance, which is responsible for budgeting all resources, foreign
and domestic. Such a move should be accompanied and supported by major
external assistance to the Ministry of Development Planning for investment
programming and to the Ministry of Finance to build aid management
capability. However, coordination between the ministries is weak. Therefore,
the two ministries should jointly constitute an aid and investment policy
group, chaired by the vice president in charge of economic and social
matters, to provide guidance and the highest-level political support for
coherent investment choices and financing decisions.
The other major priorities are as follows:
Establish an ad hoc interministerial task force, chaired by the vice president,
to identify the main problems in line ministries’ budgeting capacity and
define an action plan to address them, including incentives for better
coordination.
Assess training needs with a view to formulating and delivering a targeted
training program focused on the key functions.
Conduct a series of workshops on public financial management for
members of the legislative assembly, starting with the basics and
progressing to more in-depth treatment of certain topics (for example,
external audit).
Establish a small cell in the Ministry of Finance to give special scrutiny to
all purchasing proposals with a cost higher than a certain threshold and
to give formal clearance for their inclusion in the budget, beginning with
the budget for 2007.
Initiate the preparation of a medium-term rolling program of all sizable
investment projects, which should include only projects of demonstrated
economic viability and be fully consistent with resource availability in the
macroeconomic framework.
Implementing these measures will require sustained technical and
material assistance from donors. Unfortunately, local donor coordination is
inadequate in Burundi, mainly because of insufficient World Bank efforts to
facilitate it. In public expenditure management, the vacuum has been filled
by European Commission, which has taken the lead to formulate and agree
with the government on an assistance partnership framework, which also