African Development Fund provides US$5 million to support capacity building for public officials

The Board of Directors of the African Development Fund approved a donation of US$5.3 million to the Central African Republic in Abidjan on 6 September 2023 to contribute to the implementation of the Resource Mobilisation and Transparency of Development Policies Support Project.

The support comes from Pillar 1 of the African Development Fund’s Transition Support Facility, the African Development Bank Group’s concessional financing window. It will support capacity building for mobilising and managing internal resources, and developing and implementing more efficient, transparent public development policies.

The project’s first component aims to support the tax authorities and debt department to modernize their working methods and tools. The goal is to increase resource mobilisation and make the administrative authorities more efficient in order to increase the tax base, but also to build capacity to develop a policy on debt and effective management of public debt.

Its second component will focus on capacity building in external control bodies to create suitable conditions to reduce the risks of corruption, in particular through the adoption of an anti-corruption law. The project will also support efforts to monitor public finance and budget transparency reforms. It will support the participation of civil-society organisations in budget guidance discussions, which should lead to the development of more participatory national budgets. It will also help to build the analytical capacity of civil society and parliament, to minimise the risks of suspending budget support.

The project’s main beneficiaries are the state organisations responsible for collecting tax receipts (the tax authorities, customs authorities and the treasury) and for debt management. Other beneficiaries include the bodies responsible for overseeing and monitoring public policies and combating corruption and unlawful financial transactions.

All these bodies will benefit from capacity building through high-level technical training and targeted training programmes.