Donors on gov’t’s throat over slow implementation of financial reforms.

This was the thorny part of the third review mission of the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability, PEFA, which held at the Yaounde on March 7.

Patrick Illing, Chief of Service and Team Leader at the European Union Delegation in Yaounde, who addressed the press on behalf of donor partners, told journalists that the PEFA method of expenditure and accounting was recommended to the government of Cameroon for implementation in 2018.

Six years after, he said they were here on their third review mission and will this time around insist on seeing concrete evidence from all ministries and government departments showing that the PEFA system that guarantees transparency in expenditure and revenue receipts is actually being implemented and is yielding expected results.

The diplomat touched on some lapses they discovered during previous missions, especially as it concerns adopting PEFA standards in government establishments and decentralised collectivities like regional and local councils.

But Boumsong Sophie, Head of Department for Budget Reforms at MINFI, told journalists that things have changed greatly since the last review mission. She confirmed that government had adopted, since 2018, the accounting standards recommended by the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, CEMAC, which are in line with PEFA, in its effort to meet international standards of government accounting.

Equally important, she said, is the introduction and adoption of a contracts code by the government, which now guarantees transparency in the award and execution of all public contracts.

Just as the stepping up of training of staff of decentralised collectivities and other state agencies so that the administrators adopt the CEMAC accounting methods that are in line with PEFA.

For Finance Minister, Louis Paul Motaze, government had remained unwavering in its effort to modernise its accounting system so that it meets both the sub-regional and international standards.

This is why all budget staff of central and external services of MINFI had undergone training on how to adopt best practices recommended by donor partners. Admitting that PEFA is a veritable tool that helps governments achieve sustainable improvements in Public Finance Management, PFM practices. It does so by providing a means to measure and monitor performance against a set of indicators across the entire range of public financial management institutions, systems, and processes.

It is worth recalling that the PEFA programme was initiated in 2001 by seven international development partners: The European Commission, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the governments of France, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

PEFA began as a means to harmonise assessment of PFM across the partner organisations. It subsequently established a standard methodology for PFM diagnostic assessments, the PEFA framework. Since 2001 PEFA has become the acknowledged standard for PFM assessments.