Jan 30, 2017

CEF is Extending Focus to Line Ministries

This week, the CEF is kicking-off a series of learning activities and country visits as part of the project that focuses on strengthening coordination and financial capacities of line ministries that is supported by the SAFE* trust fund. Project beneficiaries are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. The Ministry of Finance of the Netherlands contributes Dutch expertise, and provides complementary financial support to engage officials from Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania and Ukraine to also share their experience and good practice at project activities.

Recognizing coordinating role of ministries of finance in sound public financial management (PFM) and fiscal programming, the success depends on the contribution of line ministries. Despite the large range of interests and challenges line ministries finance officials share, they have no platform that promotes learning both within and across sectors, and with peers in South East Europe, and that engages relevant international partners and networks.

With this project, we efficiently respond to a demand to support line ministries’ collaborative learning related to line ministries’ inputs to Economic Reform Programs, in particular with respect to fiscal implications of structural reforms. 

Joint learning and networking of finance officials of different ministries provides – often for the first time – opportunities for knowledge and experience exchange across different government actors and sectors. The package has been designed to overcome the unmerited gap between efforts invested in PFM capacity development of the ministries of finance as compared to the one of line ministries. It dedicates the deserved learning support to the line ministries.

*SAFE means Strengthening Accountability and the Fiduciary Environment. It is a Trust Fund program administered by the World Bank and was established by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the European Commission with the aim of improving public financial management in the Europe and Central Asia region. This Trust Fund program provides support for activities to assess public financial management (PFM) performance, identify and implement actions to achieve improvements and share knowledge and good practices across countries in the region.