The government is bringing new provision to make development partners accountable
This piece was first published in the The Reporter Weekly.
In a belated exercise, the Ministry of Finance is planning to make it mandatory for the Development partners to submit details of actual aid and their disbursement to the government quarterly.
This provision is being included in the ‘Action Plan for improving portfolio performance-2012’ prepared by the Ministry which is going to be put before the Council of Ministers for adoption shortly, official sources said.
Upon approval, the development partners shall have to submit all details—actual aid amount their disbursement –every three month under the theme of ‘mutual accountability’, a new theme added to the existing themes. The government move follows widely raised complaints about the lack of transparency in aid disbursement. ‘The mutual accountability’ is an obligation under the Paris Declaration 2005 with the objective of making the aid more effective in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). "This is the local initiation to implement the Paris Declaration- 2005," Kailash Raj Pokharel, Under Secretary in the MOF , who is also the coordinator of Nepal Portfolio Performance Report and Action Plan formulation team, said.
Official say, the latest move brings the development partners in Nepal --often critical of the Government and its machineries for the delay in implementing the projects –into the accountability net. Nepal receives almost one third of its f total budget and more than 70 per cent of total development expenditure every year from the donors.
As per the new arrangement, the development partners will have to submit their actual aid vs. disbursement amount in every three months and also the mid-term budget review. "This norm will help us to fasten the development projects which are being delayed by the slow disbursement of budget from development partners," Under-secretary Pokharel said.
Other four themes of the action plan include Public Financial Management (PFM), Public Procurement, Improving Human Resources Management and Managing for Development Results (MfDR). ‘With the new arrangement, we hope to have an environment of mutual accountability and faster pace of development’, he said.
Under the new scheme, the government will be asking development partners to submit their planned disbursements for next three fiscal years and the actual disbursement in every three months. "The huge gap between planned and actual disbursement should not exceed 20 per cent by the end of this fiscal year onward," the draft of the action plan says.
The new plan also aims at addressing the issue of lesser predictability of the aid. “It should be more predictable--which can be done only by reducing the gap between planned and actual disbursements." Under-secretary Pokharel said, adding that this action plan is going to bring all the development partners in a national record.
Development partners, mostly some bilateral ones, keep complaining about the government's weak mechanism but do not submit their periodic reports that show their level of transparency. Only 45 per cent of total amount of money development partners bring in Nepal is spent through the national budget system, and the remaining 55 per cent is spent under their discretion, something that lacks transparency.
