Project

Strengthening competencies and capacities of central Mozambican actors to improve financial governance

Drawing by Mrs. Savyra Meyer of a local admin office using for training purposes.

Focusing on transparency, sustainability and effectiveness, NIRAS helps enable the development-oriented use of Mozambican public funds, which leads to the provision of higher quality public services

August 12, 2021

SDG: #1, #5, #10, #11, #16, #17
SECTORS: Development Consulting
COUNTRIES: Mozambique
DONOR: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
CLIENT: GIZ
CONTRACT VALUE: €3,023,568
DURATION: July 2019 – September 2021

Decentralisation and local government reform in Mozambique are the result of a complex and sometimes contested process, interrupted by episodes of violence leading to peace negotiations and compromise in the redistribution of power from the central government to sub-national level.

The Good Financial Governance (GFG) project aligns with Mozambique’s decentralisation reforms. It is part of the German development cooperation programme “Decentralisation and Public Finances” implemented by GIZ. The objective is to ensure that administration entities at local and national levels – including in the extractive industry (EI) sector – apply principles of good financial governance, improving public accountability and service delivery at the local level.

Despite progress, the 53 self-governing municipalities are still unable to provide the services for which they are now responsible to an acceptable standard. This is due, among other factors, to inadequate capacity among administrative staff. In addition, the existing weak and fragmented public administrative training system does not have the capacity or institutional framework to address the training requirements for the local government staff.

POEMA’s capacity development concept

In order to improve the capacity and provision of services at municipal level, the GFG advises the ministry responsible for public administration and its education and training institutes (IFAPA) to adopt a capacity development concept for local managers known as ”POEMA” (planning, budgeting, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in Portugese) focusing on the management cycle.

The POEMA capacity development concept is used as a means to strengthen bottom-up dialogue between municipalities and central ministries and institutions. In that process of consensus building, experiences and practices largely developed and tested in the municipalities that the project supports are analysed, documented and finally anchored into the Public Administration Training System.

1195

Municipal staff trained in using official POEMA education manuals

1323

Judges, advisors of judges and auditors trained (57% male and 43% female) in oversight of extractive industries and on public road audits

133

Number of capacity development actions on oversight of extractive industries and public road audits

Trainings of POEMA’s facilitators, City of Beira. © Jean-Paul Vermeulen

Institutionalising into a permanent curricula

The upscaling of training packages for municipal government focuses on improving efficiency in financial administration and procurement, increasing the funding available through the local authorities’ own sources of revenue, and ensuring public transparency and accountability with regard to the use of funds, thereby establishing a framework for better financial governance at the municipal level.

IFAPA plays an important role as an institution that provides training courses for public administration and state employees. The strategy is to develop the institution’s capacities to use the existing POEMA modules and develop new ones. IFAPA also ”sells” its training courses to municipalities who buy training through their own resources or with funding from international cooperation programmes. The publication of the modules and their enrolment in the IFAPA curriculum as well as its anchoring in the national system contribute to the sustainability of this approach.

Institutionalising a permanent curricula

Audits in strategic areas

Another key component of the project is the strengthening of the Mozambican Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) external control of public funds. Development in the country is hampered by the fact that there is no effective and transparent government strategy for making use of the increasingly important extractive industries. To date, inefficient administration and a lack of transparency have meant that it has not been possible to use the income from this sector for the benefit of the local population. Despite an existing mandate of the SAI, audits in strategic areas such as natural resources and construction projects are still limited.

In the case of complex public construction works, emphasis is placed on the intensive use of the public works audit laboratory, inaugurated in 2018, while in the extractive industry audits, emphasis is on a wide range of topics covering the extractive industries value chain, such as recoverable costs, measurement of production, payment of royalties, local content, environmental issues, health and safety, benefits for local communities, etc.

The GFG project supports SAI in developing the capability of its own HR department to lead and manage the personnel development process in the institution that includes auditors, managers, judges and their advisors. This ensures that SAI specifically improves its quality of audits and the implementation of audit recommendations. The GFG assist SAI’s HR team in developing, implementing and monitoring a Strategic Human Resources Plan, which includes the objectives, indicators and strategic initiatives, as well as the main risks involved. Synergies with SAI’s other partners, in particular those forming part of the PLACOR (Strategic and Operational Plan of the Supreme Audit Institution of Mozambique) partners are important, in order to provide the necessary financial resources for the implementation of the constant actions of the plan.

The 2030 Agenda

The project supports SAI on its contribution to the attainment of the SDGs, through the use of the PFM-RF. This tool was developed in partnership with the African Organisation SAI-AFROSAI-E and GIZ to enable organisations to enhance their contribution towards better service delivery and evaluate the performance of different public entities, within a country on achievement of SDGs, ensuring public resources are strategically allocated, and that these allocated funds are efficiently spent. This tool has been applied in 14 countries in Africa, South America and Europe.

Specifically in support of SAI, GFG has delivered:

Strengthened capacities to speed up judgements of audits done in selected areas strategic to the country’s development (extractive industries, complex public works projects, municipalities – with special focus on municipal internal control and state-owned enterprises);
Drafting of a capacity development strategy, promoting the empowerment of its own human resources (HR) department;
Audits of municipalities, extractive industries and complex public works;
Meaningful contribution to the SDGs through the application of the Public Financial Management Reporting Framework (PFM-RF) tool.