The Governance to Enable Service Delivery (GESD) project that Government of Malawi is implementing will strengthen Local Authorities (LAs) institutional performance, responsiveness to citizens and management of resources for service delivery.
The project, among others will support efforts towards strengthening financial control measures in LAs, support recruitment and training of LA internal auditors and review LA audit management committees and capacitate them.
Briefing the Lilongwe full council, Capacity Development Specialist at National Local Government Finance Committee (NLGFC), Robins Gausi, said the project will be implemented in all the 28 LAs and will run for a period of five years.
The project is being financed by the World Bank as a grant to the tune of US$100 million.
“The project has three main indicators that will assist in monitoring if the project is being implemented in line with the main objective,” he said.
The indicators include number of local authorities that increase their score on the local authority performance assessment by five percentage points.
He said LAs should complete 80% of the capital investment projects in their annual investment plans and increased citizen satisfaction through implementation of annual investment plans.
On his part, Chairperson for Lilongwe District Council, Councilor Luciano Botomani, said the project will contribute to service delivery in the council as the project is performance based.
Botomani said he hopes that the project will transform communities since the performance based grant aligned to the government of Malawi fund is meant to complement the District Development Fund (DDF) to provide broadly discretionary resources to eligible LAs.
“This is a good development as it will make councils to be conscious on service delivery since it is the LA annual assessment results that will provide basis for allocation of the grant on yearly basis. No council would want to be allocated little resources,” said Botomani.
Gausi added that projects shall be drawn from almost all the sectors such as education, roads, health, water and sanitation, agriculture and environment.
Leading implementing agencies are Ministry of Local Government, Ministry of Finance, Local Authorities and NLGFC as fiduciary agent.
The project has four components, the performance-based financing for service delivery allocated USD73.2 million, intergovernmental accountability systems allocated USD 3.8 million, performance improvement support allocated USD18 million and adaptive management and innovation support allocated USD5 million.
Source:MANA
