Mar 6, 2017

Country Visits in the SEE Region

In the past month we visited five countries in South East Europe as part of the project “Strengthening Financial Management Functions of Line Ministries” to share information with the interlocutors from finance ministries, line ministries as well as central banks relevant for implementing the project.

The project that focuses on strengthening coordination and financial capacities of line ministries 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.

With this project, we efficiently respond to a demand to support learning needs of line ministries in developing their Economic Reform Programs, in particular with respect to fiscal implications of structural reforms.

Joint learning and networking of finance officials of many different ministries provides – often for the first time – opportunities for knowledge and experience exchange across different government actors and sectors. The program has been designed to overcome the unmerited gap between efforts invested in public financial management 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.

Find out more about individual country visits on the following links:

Albania

Bosnia and Hercegovina

Kosovo

Macedonia

Montenegro

Serbia

*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.