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110 Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia
Accountability mechanisms. Accountability mechanisms in Ethiopia’s
education sector relate to all aspects of performance and include the
monitoring of financial management, service provision to users, and the
responsiveness or otherwise of management to the needs of employees.
For the purposes of this subsection, and in view of the sectorwide
approach to most aspects of the ESDP, a distinction is made between
“supply-side” accountability to government and its donor partners, and
“demand-side” accountability to users and the employees.
Supply-side accountability. Ethiopia’s supply-side controls reflect a legacy
of strictly defined procedures and hierarchical management. Within this
context, the education sector is widely perceived to be better resourced,
staffed, and managed than other sectors, with relatively clear structures,
systems, and staffing. The guidelines and mechanisms are clearer, and the
local institutions are more involved than in other sectors. As with other
sectors, institutional capacity is considered to be stronger at the federal
level than at the regional or woreda levels, though with a wide spectrum
of capacity among both regions and woredas.
Within this context, national supply-side accountability mechanisms
include audits (both internal and independent) and school inspections.
Additional mechanisms undertaken by the donor community in collaboration
with the government of Ethiopia include the following:
• Fiduciary risk assessments to assess whether funds were used for the
purposes intended.
• Public expenditure and financial accountability reports, the most recent
of which relating to Ethiopia were in 2007, looking specifically at the
federal and regional levels.
In relation to the education sector, a specific mechanism undertaken
jointly by the government of Ethiopia and the donor community is the
annual ESDP Joint Review Mission (JRM). It is beyond the scope of this
study to comment in detail on the efficacy of any one of these or other
supply-side accountability mechanisms. General comments, however,
include the following:
• Given the high levels of expenditure and apparent difficulty in
obtaining timely and reliable data, 17 such mechanisms are only ever
likely to provide a general view of corruption risks.