Budget Oversight Committee Ethiopia House of People's Representative
An exchange of experiences on legislative oversight and upkeep processes in Africa
May 2015, by Birgit Hahn and Julia Bastian
Legislative oversight in Africa, that is the elected parliament belongings the government to account on its management of public resources, still faces a diversity of challenges. These can lead to situations where audit findings received from national Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI) are not used properly to hold government accountable.
The GIZ programme Skillful Financial Governance in Africa within its activity field Legislative Oversight seeks to enhance the capacities of parliamentary research and support services to support member of parliaments in their tasks of holding government accountable and improving budget planning and execution. A particular claiming lies in the communication between supreme audit offices and parliamentary oversight. Therefore, the programme facilitated a workshop that brought together practitioners and experts on legislative oversight from the African continent to discuss their roles and challenges and identify common ground and opportunities for joint learning.
This workshop took place in conjunction with the ten years anniversary of AFROSAI-E, i.e. the English-speaking subgroup of the African Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (AFROSAI).
During the meeting, legislative budget specialists from Cameroon, Ghana, Malawi, Morocco, Seychelles, Southward Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia and Belgium engaged in a variety of challenging and fruitful discussions on legislative oversight and enjoyed learning from their peers. Some of the discussions were aided by the use of Lego bricks; based on a learning methodology called "LEGO Serious Play", which was definitely a new experience for nigh of the specialists.
The objective behind the use of Lego was to better visualise and make the ideas brought forward by the participants more than concrete.
What made the workshop a rare occasion was the sharing of noesis across several linguistic communication groups and political and administrative systems. The participants from French and Arabic-speaking Africa had the opportunity to share their system specific experiences with their English language-speaking colleagues. During these exchanges, it became clear that although dissimilar systems are in place, challenges are often similar. Parliamentary back up services are oftentimes non in the all-time place for effectively supporting parliamentary oversight. At the stop of the workshop the participants showed their involvement in continuing with the joint-learning on public finance processes and to foster peer-learning amongst African oversight institutions.
On 7 May 2015, the participants had the opportunity to nourish the tenth Governing Board Meeting of AFROSAI-E. The topic of the solar day was the cooperation betwixt SAIs and parliaments. Information technology was discussed how this cooperation has evolved in the last decade and the participation of the members of parliamentary oversight committees assured a representation of both sides of the cooperation. The representatives of the African SAIs learned about the specific needs of their parliamentary counterparts. It was as well highlighted that a functional and permanent cooperation between parliaments and SAIs plays an extremely of import part for a strong accountability system, which keeps governments' spending under a watchful eye.
For further information please contact Dr Matthias Witt - matthias.witt@giz.de.
Links
Legislative Oversight practitioners from Cameroon, Ghana, Malawi, Morocco, Seychelles, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia & Belgium
Lego bricks used as a learning medium.
Source: https://www.giz.de/en/worldwide/33326.html
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