98
for more mobilization and awareness-raising. There are people who don’t accept you or they
are against the administration. You will see people who will fight with you when you tell them
you want to improve their lives.” Another interviewee supported this, emphasizing the need to
train journalists on how to cover policy debates and encourage citizens to participate in local
and national level discussions on issues that affect them.
Participatory and Inclusive Decision Making and Policy Development
Interviewees commented on the potential for greater engagement with civil society
organizations, intellectuals and other “experts” who currently have little or no input into
developing policies in order to plug capacity gaps and create public buy-in to the
decentralization process.
Priority Opportunities for International Support
Opportunity 1: Support local administrations in mobilizing resources, including
opportunities to partner with the private sector to finance service delivery.
In the long-term, it is recognized that local governments must generate their own funds and not
only rely on allocations from the central government and, in some cases, local development
funds as part of the UN Joint Program on Local Governance and Decentralized Service
Delivery. As noted, the overall framework for fiscal decentralization needs comprehensive
articulation in order to establish respective tax collection responsibilities (including the
resolution of disputes between districts over where taxes should be collected), to establish
systems to determine levels of and collect tax payments and (as noted) to ensure public buy-in
to the social contract between local government and citizens.
Further, local governments need to be able to explore opportunities to partner with the private
sector to finance service delivery and to capitalize on the significant resources of the diaspora.
It is essential that local governments are seen as responsible managers of public finances,
whether these be derived from government subsidies, local taxes or other sources. Local
governments need to be supported in order to establish public financial management systems
which have transparency as a key principle. While donors are very unlikely to support the
direct transfer of their funds to local administrations, they might consider experimenting with
jointly-managed budgets between implementing partners and local government for discrete
projects.
Opportunity 2: Support efforts to establish a decentralization policy.
The establishment of a single, comprehensive policy on decentralization is paramount given the
perceived lack of clarity in existing legal frameworks and potential for this issue to become a
source of tension between local and central governments and therefore a bottleneck to service
delivery. A clear policy on decentralization will empower local governments, act as a focus
point for planning, achieve clarity on the respective roles and responsibilities of the different
levels of government, and serve to provide the public with a coherent statement of what
decentralization is and what it means for how they relate to government at both the national and
local level. There is a need to determine the current bottlenecks within government in moving
