Strengthening Public Financial Management in Senegal

Thanks to funding from our development partner, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) carried out capacity development work with Senegal’s Ministry of Finance to strengthen public financial management (PFM) in the country. The project, which ended in April 2022, has achieved tangible results, including the devolution of budget authority (DBA) to line ministries and government institutions.

The DBA not only guarantees faster and smoother budget execution, but also empowers and entails new accountability obligations for principal authorizing officers (‘ordonnateurs'). By empowering line ministries, it helps ensure a more efficient delivery of goods and services to citizens.?

This reform, which derived from the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU)'s harmonized PFM framework adopted in 2009, was adopted by Senegal in Organic Law No. 2011-15 of July 8th, 2011 relating to finance acts.?

The resulting evolution of responsibilities required to reorganize the PFM system upstream in order to effectively deconcentrate the financial function in each ministry and institution. This includes the deployment of financial control, the design and extension of an information system dedicated to ministries and institutions, and the strengthening of the financial function within these administrations.

The project supported this change through daily hands-on advice from the IMF’s Resident Adviser to the Director General of the Budget, missions from headquarters, short-term experts visits, technical workshops, and peer-to-peer learning.

Combined support from the project and other development partners, as well as the strong commitment of the authorities, made it possible to introduce the DBA for 35 ministries and institutions since January 1, 2022, following a testing phase during fiscal year 2021 with 7 institutions and 10 ministries. Since then, the line ministers and presidents of institutions are the main authorizing officers for operating expenditure (excluding salaries) and investment expenditure (excluding external financing). The project also assisted with designing macro-processes for budget execution and infra-annual expenditure programming with a view to setting them in the new budget information systems (SYSBUDGET and SIGIF).

The next steps in implementing the DBA will focus on:

1. extending it to externally funded projects and, in the medium and long term, to the wage bill;
2. continuing to strengthen the financial function of sectoral ministries including the budgetary internal control; and
3. strengthening the legal and institutional framework for financial control. To this end, the continued and sustained commitment of the authorities remains an instrumental factor.

We thank the authorities of Senegal for working with IMF staff on this project, as well as the European Union for funding this critical capacity building work.

This piece is authored by IMF Senior Economists Abdoulahi Mfombouot and IMF Technical Assistance Officer Abdoulaye Touré