Local, regional councils: Minister calls for speedy setting up of IT management system for finances.

The minister made the call while chairing the second ordinary session of the National Committee on Local Finances, known in French as CONAFIL for the 2024 financial year.

The session which brought together committee members and other stakeholders, including officials from the Ministry of Finance took place in Yaounde on Wednesday, July 24. 

Speaking during the meeting, Minister Elanga Obam, emphasised the urgency of modernising the financial management systems of Cameroon’s regional and local authorities, RLAs.

The government official further underlined the critical need to advance the IT system for the accounting and budgetary management of RLAs.

“The issues surrounding this topic and the urgency of addressing them have led the Prime Minister, Head of Government, to once more prescribe the consolidation of the process aimed at providing local authorities with an appropriate financial information system as part of the government’s roadmap and the 2024 mission statement for the Ministry I head,” Minister Obam said.

He further stressed that: “Given this repeated request from the Head of Government and the shortcomings observed daily on the ground, it is vital to accelerate the process of setting up an IT management tool for local finances”. 

The session also provided a platform to review the action plan, achievements, challenges, and future steps for both the optimisation of SIMBA and the development of the new application.

The government official expressed gratitude to their partners, the French Development Agency, AFD, for recognising their instrumental role in adapting the SIMBA application to current needs. 

Enter participant 

According to the Mayor of Ngoulemakong in the South Region, in his capacity as the vice president for United Councils and Cities of Camerron, UCCC, the discussions that unfolded during the session will allow municipalities to take a further step.

“The main focus of this session is the implementation of the SIMBA system, a software that will enable the governance of local finances within our communities,” the mayor said. 

He went further to announce: “We want to ensure that the shortcomings observed in the first phase do not feature in the second phase, and we also need to implement other tools that will allow those who manage these finances daily to catch up with modernization”.

“I believe this promises a new landscape and will facilitate our entry into digitalisation with a compact tool,” the mayor added.

Queuing in from the mayor, the Director of Public Accounting at the Ministry of Finance, Archile Nestor Basahag, assured that the software would be available by the beginning of next year.

“We have already taken several steps to facilitate this transition, and we are working diligently to ensure that by January 1, 2025, the updated version of Simba will be operational in all 384 councils across Cameroon,” he said.

About Simba 

SIMBA is a software application designed to automate accounting management processes. Introduced in 2014, SIMBA enabled RLAs to manage data for the past 20 years.

According to experts, the session's proceedings are expected to pave the way for enhanced financial governance and accountability in Cameroon’s local authorities.

This story was first published in The Guardian Post issue No:3180 of Friday July 26, 2024