Burkina Faso and Mali: Developing Program Budgeting While Getting the Basics Right

Posted by Benoit Taiclet and Lewis Murara

Program-based budgeting (PBB) is considered an important tool for developing countries to channel more efficiently their resources to achieving their development goals. However, PBB is also a rather sophisticated PFM reform, especially when certain public finance management (PFM) basics still need to be improved. Burkina Faso and Mali offer interesting examples of low-income countries whose reforms started at different stages, but finally made good progress both in program budgeting and more general improvement of their respective PFM systems. This success –although it must be stressed that PPB is not yet fully functional - mostly relies on the countries’ own determined pursuit of reform. However it has been facilitated by the synergy built between several stakeholders, the IMF and its Regional Center AFRITAC West, the UNDP and its regional pole in Dakar, as well as bilateral partners such as the Belgian, German and Japanese governments.

Gradual reform or a more risky Big Bang approach?

Both countries chose at an early stage a similar, cautious multi-step scheme for reform. The first step was to ensure a strong state commitment and civil society backing, then to develop costing of policy expenditures and medium term expenditures frameworks. In this scheme PBB was planned to be developed alongside the usual input budget prior to its full implementation. So far Mali has - and Burkina Faso intends to - set up a comprehensive PBB budget as an appendix of the draft budget bill. But still this appendix remains an information tool and to some extent a planning tool only, for the Executive, Parliament and the donor community; it has, however, not yet been considered an appropriate tool to actually manage government financial resources and to monitor the performance of the services.