Budget Strengthening Initiative

2018
Multi-donor, South Sudan

The multi-country Budget Strengthening Initiative (BSI) focuses on public financial management (PFM) in fragile contexts. The support is designed to respond to national demands by providing flexible technical assistance and facilitating implementation in line with the changing political and economic realities. In South Sudan, BSI provided support to the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning between 2009 and 2018.

Catherine Dom was a senior advisor on the BSI South Sudan team between 2011 and 2018, focusing on strengthening government-led service delivery. Following initial support to aid policy formulation, Catherine led the development of key concepts and mechanisms underpinning the ‘Local Services Support’ (LSS) agenda, taken forward by a coalition of central and line ministries of the government and endorsed at Undersecretary level. The LSS agenda aims to strengthen the capacity of local governments to deliver basic social and economic services, initially targeting basic education, primary health care, rural water and sanitation and community-driven small-scale local infrastructure development. After a period of formulation of an LSS Joint Plan for Action (2011-2013), progress in implementing the agenda was notable until the fall 2015 – in spite of the civil war which started in December 2013. However, the ongoing economic, fiscal and political/ security crisis combined with politically-driven administrative fragmentation have since seriously eroded these earlier gains. Under the current circumstances BSI South Sudan donors have decided to suspend this type of support, and more generally the whole BSI South Sudan programme.

The people behind the project

Principal Consultant