Table 3.2
Summary Results of Pillar 1 – Rebuilding Core State Functions
Outcomes
Contribution of the World Bank Group
Objective: Rebuilding the public financial management system From a chaotic beginning in 2006, the budget is now prepared on time and published. Recent budgets were cast in a medium-term context. Revenue collections rose from $85 million to $275 million in four years. Public spending has grown from 11 percent of GDP to 30 percent in 3 years, with improved controls. But capacity in spending ministries remains weak. Large capital spending is often delayed.
Assistance is provided through a comprehensive package of policy advice, technical assistance and budget support. Key operations are: the series of four Re-engagement and Reform Support Programs; and the Economic Governance and Institutional Reform Project. The World Bank Group has also conducted a variety of knowledge work, including the 2009 Public Expenditure Management and Financial Accountability Review (World Bank 2009).
Objective: Rebuilding the civil service The Civil Service Reform (CSR) strategy has been completed and implementation is now underway. Restructuring has taken place in nine ministries and in the Civil Service Agency, with a reduction of employees and ghost workers from 45,000 to 34,000 in four years. The linking of biometric IDs to the human resource information system is underway.
World Bank Group support was provided through the Senior Executive Service (SES) which helped with the recruitment of qualified individuals from abroad, as well as a variety of grants for capacity development programs for civil servants, and the Economic Governance and Institutional Reform Project (EGIRP) which supported the implementation of the biometric system. In the next phase, the program needs to combine provision for gradual phase down of the SES with further capacity building efforts.
Objective: Improving governance and the rule of law The Governance Commission has provided a mechanism for ongoing reforms. The General Audit Commission has exposed fraud and enhanced financial discipline. The Anti-Corruption Commission has not yet succeeded in bringing any cases to closure. However, by bringing cases to public attention, it is providing a credible deterrent. The management and staffing of procurement functions remain inadequate.
The World Bank Group was a key party in introducing the Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program in 2005, which limited the scope for state capture. Further assistance was provided through a series of grants to support the Governance Commission and the agencies it created to improve transparency. The initial grant for judicial reform had a limited impact however, and the World Bank Group did not follow up until recently.
Source: IEG.
The program on judicial reform and anti-corruption has not been commensurate with the challenges. Judicial reform was given some prominence in the Interim Strategy Note, but in practice this only resulted in a small grant intervention with no supporting analytical work. An implicit decision was made to move away from this area in the full CAS, but a clearer explanation would have been warranted. The Bank has recently returned to the judicial reform agenda, however, both because of the importance of judicial reform to the anticorruption agenda, and because the leadership in the Ministry of Justice shows more interest (see box 3.3 below). An important gap in the government program thus far is the failure to develop a meaningful strategy for decentralization. This reflects in part the fact that the percentage of the total population living in Monrovia is one of the highest for any city on the African continent. However, in the future it would be appropriate for the government to put into place some pilot programs for local empowerment, with elected local governments in one or two of the more accessible towns in the interior.
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Liberia Country Program Evaluation: 2004–2011