[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. [...] I will be your moderator, I'm Daniel Ankrah. At this juncture, I will now call on for welcome remarks the country manager, the World Bank country manager, Georgia Wallen. A round of applause, please.
[Applause]
[GEORGIA WALLEN]
Good afternoon. Honorable Minister, esteemed government officials, Excellencies, heads of organizations, distinguished panelists, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for the launch of the 2025 CPIA in Monrovia, Liberia. We're delighted to welcome you to this event and also to extend a special welcome to Andrew Dabalen, the World Bank Chief Economist for Africa and the CPIA team here for the first time in Liberia. This launch comes at a strategic and important moment for countries across the continent with five years remaining to achieve the 2030 global goal. The 2025 CPIA report's focus on policies for better service delivery gets to the heart of the urgent challenge of stepping up on the achievement of the 2030 goal. It identifies key policy trends in sub-Saharan Africa that make a difference in supporting effective public service delivery and the focus-- or what's reflected in the report is from 2024. The CPIA is ultimately about informing and spurring policy action. I just want to share a few observations. The first is that the report points to the fact that tangible services impact the intangible vector, like trust and citizen satisfaction. Public services, like access to energy, access to water and sanitation, education, health care directly impact how citizens perceive their well-being and quality of life. The CPIA looks at categories such as building human resources, property rights, social protection, and labor, and all of these impact those important intangibles. Second, policies, institutions, and service delivery don't just happen. They depend on the daily work of civil servants, and that work matters. The core of making government function may seem mundane, but this is the key to putting public services, public resources to work for the public good. Finally, we're keen to learn lessons for Liberia. For Liberia, the CPIA launch is especially meaningful against the backdrop of the newly launched Liberia National Development Plan, the ARREST Agenda for Peaceful Development, which aims to spur service delivery, accelerate impact and results on Liberia Vision 2030. Time is of the essence. I want to encourage you to listen actively and then to download the report, which will be available at the end of today's program, and I think it's already available online right now. The embargo report noted on the cover that the embargo ended at 12:00 Liberia time. And that last point was especially thrilling for us because this is the first time the report has been launched in Liberia. We believe this is Liberia's time. It's Liberia's time to celebrate results, and it's Liberia's moment to shine. So, we thank you very much for joining us, and we wish you a very fruitful experience. Thank you again today.
[Applause]
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very kindly, Madam Georgia Wallen. Let me say that Liberia wouldn't mind having a second lunch. Next, I will now call the Acting Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Minister Anthony Myers, for his opening remarks. A round of applause please.
[ANTHONY MYERS]
Thank you very much, Daniel. Dear, Georgia, I may need to say that. Andrew, our colleagues from across the different development partner agencies and from government institutions, our great panelists. So, firstly, you will see me sitting here, and there's a reason why, but the guy sitting there is more than competent to manage the challenges that will be coming forth. So, following up on what Georgia said, it's an honor for Liberia to be choosing for what is essentially a regional event. So, on behalf of the minister and the rest of the government, I appreciate this honor given to us as a country and government via the World Bank. So, there are a number of observations and conclusions that we can draw from the report. So, firstly, it is an opportunity for self-reflection. And we must acknowledge that this process was participatory because the bank and our people across government participated in the research that led to these conclusions that we will be launching today. So, while generally one would say, and it's obvious, of course, that the school is not what we would expect. However, it's an opportunity for improvement. As a first point to note, knowing our school and knowing where we should be provides an incentive for improvement. That is the headline aspect. However, if you get into some of the details as we see in the summary sheet that is on the flyer, there are also reasons for hope in certain key areas where we score fairly good marks. So, in as much as in these areas we are able to score fairly good marks, it's an indication that those areas where the schools are favorable, the same amount of effort, the same amount of collaborative work that was put into having better schools in those areas can also be applied in those areas that the scores are so low. So, it doesn't create a cause for let's say panic or for the usual PR or the usual speed that follow events like this or that follow reports like this because there's the transparency in there, there's the past in there, there's a PFA in there. So, when these kind of reports come out, there are multiple and varying interpretations in the public. But for us, as far as we are concerned with the engagement that we have with the bank and its institutions, we take this report as a baseline for further improvement on all of our governance issues, and we can assure you, our partners in the outside government, that to the extent that the Ministry of Finance is involved with coordinating the development processes of the government as well as the management of the economy because these indicators represent aspects of economic management, they represent aspects of international cooperation, they represent aspects of institutional reforms and governance reforms. We will make all of the efforts. We will use this as a learning experience. We'll use this as a motivation to ensure that the next review, the next report, the 3.1 that we see on the summary sheets, we will be much higher up the scale than what we see here. So, with that, and we already have gone a little bit into our time, I want to say on behalf of the Minister of Finance and our colleagues at the Ministry of Finance and Development planning and across government that this launch event is formally open. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very much, the Acting Minister of Finance, Minister Anthony Myers. Next is the presentation of the CPIA for Africa report, and this will be done by the Chief Economist for Africa, Mr. Andrew Dabalen, and Nicholas Woolley, the economist. Please give them a round of applause.
[ANDREW DABALEN]
Okay, very good. Can you hear me? So, good afternoon, Minister Myers, government officials, delegations from development community, distinguished panelists and guests. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Andrew Dabalen. I'm the Chief Economist for the Africa World Bank. This is my first time in Liberia, so I'm doubly delighted that we are able to do this. So, before I begin, we're going to do this presentation in two parts. I will introduce what we do with the CPIA, and then my colleague, who is actually the primary author of this report in my office, will come and give you the highlights. So, I want to say, just as a preamble, three things. One is that as the minister and Georgia mentioned, this is a regional launch. So, this is not a Liberia-specific launch. This is a report that we produce for the entire region, the sub-Saharan Africa, which my office is responsible for. And we are the only ones who do this in the World Bank. This report only comes out actually for African countries. The rest of the countries that are considered
[inaudible]
. And the reason we do this is because half of the countries that are members of IDA, International Development Association fund for low-income countries, are in Africa. So, we do this in order to be able to use it as a tool of engagement with our African countries, and also to benchmark the progress as these countries do reforms. Now, those of you who are not familiar with CPIA, the P stands for policies, the I stands for institutions. So, it's Country Policies Institutions Assessment. It's an assessment. So, what is it then exactly? What is the CPIA? Let's see. It's not moving. Let me see. Give us a minute to get this settled. So, the computer seems to be-- One minute, please. So, while we work on this, what is the CPIA exactly? So, the CPIA is an assessment of policies and institutions of African countries. Now, what we don't do is we don't evaluate outcomes. We have other tools to do that. What we do is actually instead assess actions and reforms that are in the control of African governments. So, you do reforms and you take actions in specific areas, whether that is in education, in health, social protection or not, and then we benchmark those reforms relative to others. So, it's a relative assessment. So, as you can see, this is a reform. Basically, it's a measure of the quality of reforms. So, we don't actually do a reform of the assessment. Instead, we basically look at policies that have been undertaken, actions that have been undertaken in specific areas. There are 16 areas where we do these assessments. And we clustered them into four big clusters and pillars. One is macroeconomics. The other one is the real sectors. Other ones is issues around equity. And then, the final cluster is public institutions. We do these assessments in a way that is very collaborative and coordinated with the governments, but we have to have an independent assessment ourselves. In the end, we discuss these reforms with the government, but we have to have independent assessments. And these are people who are really knowledgeable about these countries. So, these are bank staff that are very knowledgeable about these countries, that live in these countries, that work in these countries. And they are the ones who do these assessments. But there are a whole series of, within the bank, a whole series of checks to see whether, in fact, these are credible assessments because there are a lot of people who actually evaluate the evaluators. So, what we do is we do both a qualitative assessment, but also quantitative assessments. So, we take into consideration other people and other institutions' assessments of the government policies and reforms, and then what we do is, at the end, we have a benchmark and a league table of how the governments have performed. And in fact, what you see in the report at the end is not just some broad take on the reforms in Africa and the success and failures, but also specific country reforms and the ones that are doing well or not. And so, what I will do is I will end here and invite Nicolas to come and give us some high level messages, not necessarily specific country messages.
[NICHOLAS WOOLLEY]
Thank you, Andrew. As Andrew said, the CPIA presents an overall view of the country policy and institutions based off of a review process that incorporates experts, and expertise, and opinions across the World Bank, incorporating the inputs of over a thousand people every year. It's my pleasure to announce that for this year, the overall average for sub-Saharan Africa, for countries that are eligible for development assistance, has moved in lockstep with the global average. Now, this follows a handful of years, effectively since 2019, in which the region was catching up with the global average. And in 2023, the region caught up. And now, we can see that this is consistent for the second year running, which is really good news in context and the perspective of a region with a high level of conflict affected countries, a high level of resource rich countries, both of which we know present unique challenges for institutional and policy development. Looking a bit more at the detail, as Andrew mentioned, there are 16 different scores for the CPIA, and we cluster these according to four different clusters. So, the first cluster is economics and economic stability. And specifically, that includes macroeconomic management, but also fiscal policy and debt policy. We also have the second cluster, cluster B, which we call structural policies, but those are really focused on private sector development. And so, that includes trade, it includes private sector policies, including competition policy, and includes financial markets as well. The third sector, cluster C, is all around social equity, gender equality, public protection, poverty policies. And these three clusters, economic management, structural policies, and social inclusion and equity, have all done relatively well in recent years. As a matter of fact, they've actually accelerated in recent years to a point where they're offsetting some poor performance for the region in the fourth cluster, and that's the cluster that focuses mostly on governance. So, that includes courts and public sector transparency and accountability, but it also includes kind of more nitty-gritty issues around public financial management, on how money is actually spent in the expenditure side. And so, that is actually somewhat alarming for the region. So, what are the trends that are leading to this? Why are these scores actually coming about? And that brings us to the high-level messages in the report. So, it's no news to anybody that sub-Saharan Africa has struggled over the last decade with per capita GDP growth. The region has been facing some very strong headwinds, many of which are international, and in many respects, there's been some strong efforts to actually respond to these international crises. One thing that's actually worth noting about this is that the countries that the CPIA focuses on, the countries that are eligible for international development assistance, have actually outperformed the regional average for GDP per capita growth. And specifically, 2024 was a particularly good year in terms of economic growth for these IDA eligible countries. Now, this is all coming in the context of there have been a lot of measurements of discontent and a lot of expressions of discontent in the region in the last year. And if you ask people what are they upset about, where are the areas where they think that the governments are facing the most important problems, of the top five issues that people have identified, four of them are public service related. Of the top ten, five of them are public service related. So, public services are definitely something that people have on their minds when they're expressing their opinions about government. And moreover, when you ask people, they also think that these public service delivery has gotten worse over the last ten years. So, here we see five different areas of public service delivery, and people have responded in surveys saying that these public services performed badly at a much higher level than ten years ago. So, that's cause for concern. Now, this all happens in the context of tight credit constraints, in which governments have higher levels of debt than they did ten years ago, almost across the board. So, paying for this public sector and public service delivery is going to be more and more difficult moving forward. And this is the challenge that the region finds itself in. This is probably nothing new to you as I'm talking here today. So, the question is, what do we do about that? And this is what the CPIA report really is all about. It's going to require countries in the next few years to both learn from the best practices of how to deliver public services in ways that have worked across the region, but also to be a bit creative and to get attention for that creativity so that other countries can learn from that too. And one of those areas, it's very straightforward, but not very exciting, but very important, is public financial management. You're taking a certain amount of money from the population in your taxes, and then those go towards paying for government services. The actual management at the nitty gritty of how you handle that money can have huge impacts on the quality of services down the line. And this is an area in which there's a lot of opportunity for growth within the region, from things like transparency, reporting, medium term reports where countries can not just announce their plans for the near term future, but then can also build credibility by meeting those plans and actually explaining why they deviate when they do. And another area that is very closely related to public financial management is treasury single accounts, which can have huge impacts on just the basic management of money within government, increasing accountability and transparency for how money is handled. So, from there, I will encourage you all to go look at the report for specific examples and hand it over to the panel.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very much, Nicholas, for that presentation. Well, as time is fast spent, we'll now move on to the panel discussion. I'd like to say that this report places a timely spotlight on a critical pillar of development, which is service delivery. That is why we have these experts here today who will help us unpack some of these findings, reflect on the progress, and most importantly, chart a way forward. So, I will basically now introduce the panelists, and then we'll begin the panel conversation. We have Mary Duncan Dahn. She's the MERL coordinator at Plan International, and she has more than 15 years of experience managing strategies, evaluations, and stakeholder engagement for domestic and international health programs. Also on this panel, we have Mr. Gabriel Okeowo. He's the country director of BudgIT Nigeria, a civic organization that leverages technology to improve citizen engagement and drive institutional reforms. Also on this panel today, we have the Assistant Minister for Economic Policy, Macroeconomic and Financial Sector, Mr. Henry D Z Yanquoi from the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. Ladies and gentlemen, please a round of applause for our panelists.
[Applause]
And of course, I'm your moderator, Daniel Ankrah. So, we now begin the panel conversation. Our panelists will have three minutes to answer each question in order for us to be able to meet up with time. So, having said this, let me also say that we are also live on the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning social media page as well as Webex from the World Bank. And so, we will now get into the conversation. The first question is a shared question for all three of you. And like I said, you have three minutes to respond. The report suggests that rising discontent reflects poor public service delivery. And if I must add, when I read, I also saw that it's much higher than a decade ago, which might seem concerning. And so first, I'd like to gauge your opinion about the interpretation of the report in this specific regard. So, I'd like to begin with you, Madame Dahn.
[MARY DUNCAN DAHN]
Thank you so much. Yes, indeed. Rising discontent make up a lot of issues, especially when citizens are not receiving the required services that are needed to ensure that, yes, indeed, their safety is at risk. So, definitely, once those are situations, you see that there are discontentment. You see citizens having this dissatisfaction that gave rise to a lot of protests. Reflecting in the last two years, you see that there have been a lot of protests. There have been a lot of
[inaudible]
in other countries because of the issue of discontentment. So, it is very key that government take key notes of citizen services delivery in order to ensure that there is peace and stability in Africa at home. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. Mr. Okeowo.
[GABRIEL OKEOWO]
Okay, yeah. Thank you very much, Daniel. I cannot read this with the overall outcome of the report. And if I had to, what my sister mentioned is also to note that when you look at the average, one of the interesting things that we saw in that report is that the global average, Africa is catching up or has caught up with the global average two years running, which looks good on one hand, but on the other hand, is that for the ordinary citizens, we want to see what does this really translate to in how efficient is the transportation system for me now? How accessible is health care services? How affordable is food, energy, and those basic things? For as long as this nice impact achievement we are seeing broadly is not trickling down to improving the everyday life of ordinary citizens, then we are still a bit far from it. So, service liberties. If I then use an example of Nigeria where I came from, several reports have pointed to the fact that procurement fraud is the highest chunk of kind of fraud that happens. And where does procurement fraud come from? It comes from service delivery. As you see, that's project that's meant to develop and deliver to local groups, to communities. Those are loopholes where this kind of fraud happens. And I'm sure it won't be clear to Nigeria. So, if there is going to be an advocacy action from this report, it is how do we match this improvement we are seeing in macroeconomic outcomes with the lives and welfare of everyday citizens? Thank you very much.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very much. Finally, Minister Okeowo, what is your perspective, especially that we are in Liberia, hopefully we can get a Liberian context to it.
[ANTHONY MYERS]
So, the issue of rising discontent reflects, or is rested on, service delivery. You have to know an argument to that is true, but there is a positive correlation between service and delivery. Why are you being true? Is that a factor once there a mismatch of a very defined citizen becoming dissatisfied? The question most citizens
[inaudible]
program between they and government? If that piece of the government side is missing, obviously you have that discontent from the public. Another thing could be your direct impact on daily life. If you're not having electricity, you're not having saline water, you are having healing programs, I mean bathrooms, you're having infected places, you actually experience some discontent from the public. You want to look at visible inequality in and out of corruption. So, in a community, those who have are living at a certain level, while poor people are living at another level. That margin, that inequality, will actually lead to some level of discontent. And I will give you some examples. In Liberia, we saw protests in this country because of the issue of electricity. In Nairobi, Kenya, we were just received a lot of people who had issues with the level of tax. They felt they were being marginalized, and they were holding them somewhere that I think the government was handling well. It's very common in countries like Africa, where you see citizens even going on the wrong page because of job issues. But there are other issues too that lead to discontent. The economic hardship, political unrest, you have some social issues, major issues. So, we think we can recommend the way forward as a government is to rationalize public expenditure and afford resources to where they are most needed. We need to increase investment into our public sector investment program. And I would tell you openly, with the introduction of the AAID, the ARREST Agenda for Included Development, we are developing now a working draft of immediate templates for framework that will address the net budget to say we need to put more into public sector investment projects. From 2006 to now, we have been able to invest more than 100 billion into direct budgeting for public sector investment projects. I'm using the word direct because we also take loans that go into projects, and we pay back those loans with direct budgeting. The other side, on the real side, we are stepping on 2011 where we put in 20% of our resources into PSIP. We haven't been able to spend more than 10% in the public sector investment project. So, what is the new policy direction for that? We don't want to distort foreign programs that are ongoing. So, we say we hold 2025 as the base year, and any additional revenue, we apply the ratio of 60-40 in favor of capital expenditure.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Okay, so I'd like to hold you there and come to the other panelists. It's interesting, but I'm done. Some of the recent reports from the Africa Chief Economist Office have suggested the lack of quality education as a major service delivery issue. And from your office, MERL, as the MERL Coordinator at Plan International, how do you see this? And what can be done to address-- What effective ways can we address having quality education?
[MARY DUNCAN DAHN]
Thank you so much, Daniel. Thank you, Daniel, for the question. So, yes, indeed, there have been some improvement in terms of quality education, but the challenge still exists. There are a lot of challenges when it comes to our educational sector. And some of those challenges range from qualified teachers, some range from infrastructures, some range from having the availability of resources to ensure that those services are provided at the standard requirement. What could be done to improve some of these things? So, what we could do as a country, one, could be ensure that our policies that are made are inclusive, make sure that we have both the students, the teachers, including our community at the lower level involved into our policies. Also, ensure that we have fundamental strengthening of the system. That is, ensure that our teachers have those necessary requirements to ensure that they have a stronger foundation and also have those requirements that ensure that they are full school to ensure that education is provided at that standard. Also, we have to ensure that the PTA, that which we call Parent Teacher Association, is strengthened because that's another way of ensuring that our children receive the quality education that is needed because once we have our community with or we have the parents involved in ensuring that they are supervision from the very angle to ensure that those services are given at the quality level, definitely there will be quality educational services received at that lower level. I just want to also say to you that because we have to be sure in terms of education at the lower extreme versus those at the higher level, we notice that we still have a weak system. So, if we can ensure that people at the lowest end are receiving the same standard of education as compared to those in the very biggest cities and so forth, we'll have quality education, and we'll have quality when it comes to our services. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. All right, Mr. Okeowo, services are often meant to be offered for development and for people to benefit. However, some of these resources are typically centralized in most African countries before they are redistributed, and at the redistribution point, it becomes an issue. What model can we have that will probably work effectively in a decentralization of resources? What do you think?
[GABRIEL OKEOWO]
Thank you very much. What we are seeing in a lot of African clients is that local government is being incapacitated. And that is a big problem because the proximity of government to the people is better in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of government delivery process. In a situation where revenue generalization or resource mobilization is concentrated at the center only, at the national government only, what we are creating is that we are creating a system that communicates to the other tiers of government that they can go to sleep and just expect answers. And most of the time, that creates a sort of dependency syndrome. It creates a lot of gap in inefficiency. And that's why in a lot of our countries today, you find things that are simple as empowerment of artisan groups. Provision of grinding machine, hairdressing, equipment, we find that this is still an intervention that's being done by national government, which is not meant to be. I believe if we are going to look at sustainable model, the new government we have in Nigeria, last year, led the attorney general of the tradition, led the courts proceeding that led to the judgment of giving autonomy back to the local government. It's there to be fully seen, but in a case like that, it's like a step in the right direction. We must give power back to the grassroots. And not just that you give power back to them, let's create a system that also involve them in revenue mobilization. Let's create a system-- I put three points down on this. Support global revenue capacity. They should not just be there waiting for answers, whatever that calls. They also need to understand what it is that goes into mobilizing resources. I was discussing with Mary from the airport coming into town. You will see quite a vast expanse of land on both ways. And practically, you cannot see any economic activity between there and here. And there are people that are living there. If we must improve service delivery, we must create a system where we're able to create local economy that empowers local people that put resources in their hand. And then, they are also able to see themselves in the resources that the national government is generating. Secondly is then for us to put a stronger regulatory framework in place. And lastly is to enable citizens and treasure groups. Create an enabling environment where citizens and treasure groups are able to be involved in monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of the management of these resources. Thank you very much.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. Now, as we are trying to do our best to ensure that services reach people with low income, it's also interesting to ask, how do we draw a line between where people in private positions or people that are considered to be rich may the amount of services that are reached to them and the provision of services to them may undermine the amount of public service that is provided to people at the lower level? How do we bridge a gap as governments across Africa to be able to even up between service delivery to people who can afford and service delivery to people who cannot afford?
[ANTHONY MYERS]
[Inaudible]
listening to the public economists. Like I said before, the issue of inequality is a serious problem because you can't have people who live in the same community from the same country. I do agree with the people, but then there are basic needs that are having to be made. You asked a question earlier on the issue of education. We have to provide resources who are in that section. We need to provide services. Just this week and yesterday, and then they have had the bill passed. They're going to improve and upgrade the Bangor Community College to the university level. And while we are asking the question, we already having the environment, we already have the facilities, we already have the laboratory, we already have the instructor to teach at the school. This question was being asked a lot. We want to provide these services. We see that those who
[inaudible]
be able to pass it through the education. The issue of the private sector, there is no excuse. If we want to improve our economy, our system, we have to invest in policy. Yesterday, we called the House for a hearing. I want to comment on reporting others, on the issue of export forcing back issues. There are weasels that are stealing our shoes from our very resources. The inventors come to our country, mine our gold, our diamond, our iron ore, sell them out there. They are not even bringing them back to our country. They wouldn't bring back what we use to pay the taxes we get with the royalty of the free stocks. Those resources should be resident in our bank. They aren't restricted in how to use them. They have to come after our shoes. Every time our banks
[inaudible]
, we lend out SMEs. SMEs become increasing, they move to the middle network to provide more jobs. Households can benefit, get more resources. They can provide a meal for their kids. They provide legislation.
[Inaudible]
And all the issues have to be part of the human health sector. This week on the news, we hear that some of our rural facilities need to come, and they survive.
[Inaudible]
.
[Inaudible]
educational institutions and community colleges, they have students coming more time to be in schools, more time in libraries. So, that's where you find people who can answer
[inaudible]
. For people who cannot afford to go to other places to seek medical services, they have those services available in the country. And those are brought in
[inaudible]
from the resources of our country. We can trust that government in that case.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
It's a fine line. So finally, the final questions across to the panelists as we shortly wrap-up of this conversation. Tons of people have this point. How can we show that budget reform and best practices in the public financial management sector can generate positive change at the delivery level?
[GABRIEL OKEOWO]
We need to begin to look at some global best practices, particularly when it comes to service delivery. The idea of service delivery is not just to approach our resources for what we think the people need. We need to begin to really shape our approach to what we call the bottom-top approach, starting from the needs assessment of the people. And it's not enough to have needs assessment, but also to ensure that there is a system that creates a full picture of what needs to be addressed, what may be affected in the process of us addressing this need, what are the likely problems that we are also likely to create or might emerge as a result of creating or addressing the current needs at hand, so that when we have all of this full picture, number one, it allows us to strategically contribute to development. We have had instances that were part of Nigeria we have gone to where a new government at the sub-national level came into power, and without an assessment of the state of education infrastructure that the state has, the government wanting to impress or do well, declare free education for the state, and all of a sudden, you then find a new problem in your hand. Free education in the state, you now have a facility that's meant to cater for 100 persons, you have 1,000 persons in your hand, 1,000 openings in your hand, right? And that was because there was no proper assessment that was done. Yes, we will identify the need, address the need, but in addressing the need, we need to put in strategy into it, we need to put systems in place. In some other places, I think it is in the UK, is it the UK that they have the Green Treasury books, something like that, where we know that certain form of evaluations, in some other times you do in part evaluation for you to know this need we want to address. What other thing does it really create, right? Service delivery at the grassroot level is critical. That is the best way that we can show development. That's the best way, right? Developer sector, anything we do, we must be able to see the impact of that on the life of human life at the end of the day. Thank you very much.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you, Gabriel. Finally, what strategies can civil society organizations like yours do to help push for an effective form of reform and be able to hold governments accountable?
[MARY DUNCAN DAHN]
So, CSOs should be able to hold governments accountable, meaning that those CSOs should serve as ambassadors to be able to hold governments accountable. Firstly, there should be inclusiveness in decision making. All decisions that are going to be made should include all of those responsible to ensure that those decisions are decisions that are holistic. Also, civil society should also ensure that whatever decisions that are made have realistic targets and also they have room for review. And in reviewing those strategies or those plans that are made, they should be able to have room for tracking and also ensure that whatever comes out of the challenges, they are able to identify or discuss ways of handling those challenges and they are able to have room for reframing some of those decisions that are made. So, for me, I would tell you that in order to have civil society holding government responsible, there should be room for inclusiveness in whatever decisions that will be made. We should also have room for review of those decisions. We should also have room where we'll be able to ensure that monitoring, evaluation, supervision are all done to see what level we are in a continual check and balance to ensure that we have quality services at the lower end. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. Finally, you know sometimes it's not that a government may not want to provide service. Sometimes it's because of the internal politics associated with the provision of different kinds of services. At this point, how do you think civil society organizations, who may not be your friends or not your enemies as well, how do you think they can help you as a government in navigating some of the internal politics that may exist in most governments and may impact adequate service delivery?
[ANTHONY MYERS]
In the first place, we in government are not the only people who have ideas. But when they open up to our input, they are the reason why engaging CSO staff on the plane is hard. We must have a national plane. In carrying a national plane, you must involve all stakeholders, including CSO. In the case of the current government, we are developing an AID. We just do a national plane. We also do a county government action. If we are in our plane, we go into business, talk to CSOs, talk to local leaders to have the input. We have measurable indicators in there, also came from that. Not same as a point of evaluation for the government. Now, the next thing we have to do is a report on the AID regularly.
[Inaudible]
, we are going to have a report. So, they will have a group of technicians immediately working on some of the documents. If you come up with a report every year of some mineral here, CSOs and other people will be able to tell you, they say you do as well as you do. The last hearing had a CSO there. They can write their questions and comments on a paper
[inaudible]
to be able to have their views. So, I think that there's no way we can move the country forward without having everybody, whether they are your friend or not, who will help the country to grow. Thank you, everybody.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, may we give our panelists a round of applause for their deliberations?
[Applause]
We will take just two questions. If anyone has a question for any one of our panelists, we will, just because of time, we'll just take two questions if anyone has a question for our panelists. Yes, I think. Okay. Okay, if you're there, you can just go ahead.
[SAMUEL S GAINES SR]
Okay. I'm Samuel S Gaines Sr., and I'm the Executive Director of the National Foundation on Disabilities. I would like to thank the World Bank for such a monumental program, and the panelists are doing well also. Mine is more like a statement and not a question because I hear a lot about inclusivity, and I don't hear a lot about building with world-class design, accessibility. Even this building is not accessible. There's not even a sign language interpreter to be able to interpret to people who are deaf to understand what's going on. They make parts and parts of the country. I remember a few months back, I attended the Armagh Berlin Conference, the Global Disability Summit. They spoke to 15% percent of international development funding being purposefully given for persons with disabilities in their developmental agendas because as we know, persons with disabilities are mostly overlooked, underestimated, discriminated against, stigmatized. In fact, in liberal arts, it's a social sanctioned statement. Whether inadvertently or deliberately, that remains to be seen. So, my thing is, and my question and recommendation is, when the World Bank or development partner is giving out money for development, I think that they should subscribe to the Armagh Berlin Conference, which has 15%, meaning 15% of the world population are persons with disabilities, and so that means 15% of developmental fiduciary responsibility should come to persons with disabilities. And I'm not talking about money to get blind people off the street, which is very important. Blind beggars need to get off the street. But we're talking about investing into disability issues, say, for example, assistive technology device. Persons with disabilities can tap into the $38 billion assistive technology device market and can be major former sectors contributors to Liberia. But it's an ordeal that we get at the wrong end of the stick. And because there's nothing that specifies that 15% of this money that comes to the country should go to persons with disabilities, we continue to see exclusive street begging. We'll continue to see aggressive pan handling. We'll continue to see inequality. Somebody talked about inequality. We'll continue to see the lack of inclusivity. And in the agenda for our ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development, specifically speak to inclusivity. Our president ruled in the election in the mantra of diversity. But unfortunately, we're not talking about that. And when we talk about that, we usually refer to winning. Persons with disability encompass 20% of the population, and I think it's a population that needs attention. And there can be no development without disability equity. So, I think international partners, like the World Bank, should also invest in disability equity by subscribing to the Armagh Berlin Conference for the 15%. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. Another question. That's the only hand I saw. George, can you help him? Was there another hand back there? OK, so if those are all the questions, then we say thank you to all of our panelists for the interesting conversation. I'm sure all of us have been taking notes and taking key points where necessary. At this juncture, I will call back the chief economist from the World Bank to provide us with the closing remarks for this program. Let's give him a round of applause, please.
[ANDREW DABALEN]
OK, so thank you so much to the panelists. I was obviously listening very attentively. So, thank you, Gabriel, Mary, and Minister Henry. That was something we need to think about ourselves. If I may summarize, what I learned was that there is a real reason for the discontent taking place in the continent, right? They're going through economic hardship. Service delivery quality is not up to par. And we should mention that, in fact, this is not a problem that's going to go away easily, given the demographic trends in the continent, right? This is a continent where population will double in our lifetime, the next 25 years. And all these people, the ones who are alive now, thank goodness, and the ones who will be born need services in order to flourish. And so, it's going to get tough for African countries. And so, there is an urgency of governments to become more efficient. That's what I've heard from you, to become more inclusive, as that gentleman just mentioned. It shouldn't be that complicated to build a little ramp in a building like this for people who are disabled who need that ramp to be able to have access to this building to have so. Not only inclusive, but the quality of the services need to improve. And then, these services need to be felt in the lived lives of people. That's the message, I think, that has come very clear. And then finally, you mentioned-- Not finally, the second last point I heard from you as panelists is that we need to have state capabilities improve. Strengthen, for example, the capacity of local governments to deliver services, have that local government be working in partnership with central governments, but also in partnership with private sector, which we will need badly going forward for obvious reasons that I'm about to mention. You need to have a private sector that is going to be-- We need to deliver services that are going to make private sector competitive, but also attractive to a particular locality and context. So, that's what I've heard, and that's all extremely on point and encouraging. But let me just give you a couple of other points in closing. The continent faces a very difficult contest. First, we have a geopolitical competition we haven't seen in several decades, and we don't know which direction it will take. And it will obviously affect a lot of the things that we're talking about, how our states react, how they organize themselves, and so on and so on. We have disruption in trade, which obviously will affect global economy, it will affect trade arrangements, and so on and so on, potentially lead to fragmentation. Hopefully not, but we never know. So, that's another thing that the continent is facing. The aid architecture is changing. A lot of countries are basically cutting aid or walking away from it, and that also will have potentially disruption. Even if it is in the short term to medium term, it will be very disruptive. In the meantime, a lot of our countries also are dealing with debt, very high levels of debt, where many of them are actually spending more money servicing debt than they are spending on education and other services that desperately need to be delivered. So, this is where these countries are. These are the challenges. What this means is that a lot of the things that so far have been anchors of this long century of globalization are coming under pressure and a challenge. So, what that implies is that, in fact, if you can't rely on them anymore, as in the past, the one thing that is under the control of African governments is internal reforms that strengthen their economies, that strengthens their capabilities. So, the reason why we do something like the CPIA is precisely because those kinds of reforms can be a real tool for building a momentum of internal reforms. Now, the World Bank uses the CPIA reforms as part of its IDA allocations, the International Development Association fund allocations, right? And a lot of countries sometimes get motivated because they get additional resources in order to be able to. So, they do these reforms, potentially then. But internally, in the bank, when we talk to African governments, we tell them, "That's nice and good, but that is not the main purpose why you should do these reforms.” The main reason why you should do these reforms is because precisely what we've just heard. A, the gains to doing reforms are much larger than what you can get from IDA allocations. Much, much larger. Why? The investors will look at your country that is really a major reformer, and they say, "I want to go and invest there.” And you're likely to attract billions and billions of dollars in private sector investment, whether that is in mining, whether that is in public-private partnerships, energy generation, whether that is in trade, and so on and so on. So, the gains to actually doing these internal reforms that serve as a signal are much, much larger. And that's what's going to create jobs, that's what's going to increase incomes, that's what will enable you to build better services and increase public trust and cooperation from citizens. So, that is the reason why we use the CPIA. Not to replace IDA allocations, but to really, really do reforms that are going to be extremely important for the country and for the citizens of that country. I want to end there. Thank you so much, all of you, for your time and for coming to this session. And we look forward to further engagement around this. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very much. We'll now take two questions from the media, three questions from the media. So, please call your full name, the institution you work for, and then your question. Yes, we can go ahead. All right, so you can go ahead.
[STANLEY JOHNSON]
Good afternoon. I'm Stanley Johnson from the Liberian Broadcasting System. Let me thank the chief economist, Andrew, for the presentation and all that, and the team as well, the panelists for the engagement. So, the report has identified causes of discontent among citizens in the country. But my question is, what specific reform actions says the government across Africa should localize, or shall be localized, it were what the government of Liberia can do to support public service delivery, that we have a trickle down effect that will reach the citizens from every nook and cranny and not only in Morocco? Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. So, we'll just take the questions, and then you can just jot them down, and then you can respond. The second person.
[UNKNOWN SPEAKER]
Good afternoon. My name is
[inaudible]
. Okay, thank you for the presentations. Thank you to the panelists. As I sat back there and listened to the presentations, including the one from the chief economist, one thing that came to mind is about what was reported over time across Africa, African journalists as well. The issue of the current system over time, even the World Bank, with all of the reports, today the climate is changing. Like you've mentioned, the West and some other countries outside there have been giving African money or whatever support going down. But then, let's look at it internally. What would the World Bank advance beyond just what we've listened to? The view of high-essence with regards to the practicability, the pragmatism in ensuring that service delivery becomes something of high-essence beyond just the theory, beyond just the lectures.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. And the final question.
[NELSON COLEY]
Well, thank you. My name is Nelson Coley, and I am from Small TV. Going through the report, my attention was drawn specifically to this aspect that highlights 2024 as a year of protests, that built some sort of lack of confidence amongst the young people. And it further states that of the 17 elections that were conducted in 2024, you had just a few incumbents who were re-elected. And so, my concern is, where do we strike the balance, especially with such a report, considering that there is the internal politics from the respective countries, given that the respective countries have opposition establishments, regardless of whichever government is in power. And their objective is to take away from the things that the respective governments make. Where do we strike the balance, especially assessing these governments, the institutions, and all of that?
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you very much. We can have very brief responses from the panelists, and then we can conclude.
[ANTHONY MYERS]
Let me start with Nelson Coley and the issue of striking balance between opposition and the government. For me, as a country, I am concerned about seeing that we are stable. We do have opposition, and if this were as if the intention is to be the one government in the state. But what an existing government can do, or an administrator can do is to do our best to provide the best service for our people. When that is done, we can discard the political issues. We are in a space where even in government, we still need to live within our environment. And you'll be asking yourself, "What did we do when we were there?” So, once you deliver well, the other questions will come later. We cannot kick against opposition, ones who have a democratic environment, so they will always be there. So, these are issues we need to look at. I know Stanley Johnson from ERBC was concerned about reform action from the report. I haven't gone into detail in the report. I will say this.
[Inaudible]
. I didn't go through all the elements in the report. But what we can do as a government, looking at just the overall summary of the report, what intervention have we been making to ensure that we provide services? Just yesterday, the Ministry of Public Works was on the way to the Deputy Minister and laying some plans how we are going to get involved with our infrastructure development minerals. We provide the environment electricity for doing business. The report, we now have a 24-hour service, introduced just a week or two ago. How do we lend more funding to the private sector to have its own economic mechanism to multiply the resources, creating jobs and leading to other issues that even raise revenue of governments. When we talk about dependency, we need to invest more into domestic revenue mobilization, giving the geopolitical issues a cut in what I view. When we do that, we have the strength enough to invest in capital expenditure. I'm talking about actual capital expenditure. We need to disaggregate our capital expenditure, looking at tangible capital expenditure and the soft capital expenditure. In our context, some of the programs we have for capital expenditure, you may not see structures that are built. Now, we invest in other programs. There are a whole lot of things that go around that we need to look at as a government. The report is very important. We will take it, we will go through it as policy makers, read it and see. It also corrects us to where we think because we realize issue of governance. If you look at our current performance, the first half of this fiscal year, transparency and accountability took 45%, which is the highest. That means we are investing more. You see the asset recovery, the IACC, the aggregate net support, the GAC. There are all this ongoing, and assets have been taken to ensure we fight corruption. I will tell you somebody joking. In this government, when you see money, you are asking, "Should I take it or not?” In past governments, when you see money, is it let me take it. Just by seeing that money, you are exposed to going to the IACC for questions. Just by seeing it, I saw it, but I didn't take it. So, these measures are very important to strengthen our governance environment to fight corruption with your resources where they are mostly needed. Thank you.
[GABRIEL OKEOWO]
Let me add to it. I think one response that we got across all the three questions and is a message to the government is government will still have to do more, particularly in making information available, data available that citizens, civil society organizations and the rest can use to hold them accountable. But the end game is not actually to just hold government accountable. It's to strengthen trust with the people. And if there is trust with the people, development will be easier. I will give an example. In 2019, the former administration in Nigeria launched a portal that is called the Open Treasury Portal. And what the Open Treasury Portal does is that all the ministries, departments, and agency have a mandate that every spend they do in their MDAs above five million Naira, five million Naira is about $3,000, US dollars, daily should be uploaded on the Open Treasury Portal. And not just uploaded, you are then able to see who collected the money. Who is the contractor? What is he meant for? Is it a tranche payment? Is more payments still going to be done on the activity line? And that in itself then empowers the citizens, empowers media journalists, media agencies, civil society organizations to be able to do some level of monitoring and some level of tracking, right? This is something that we have seen is working, and other governments in Africa may need to also emulate the same thing. Let's arm our citizens and pressure group with information to be able to hold us accountable. And not just information. And we always also differentiate information availability from information accessibility, right? We can go to government, and they will tell you, they will show you that, oh, this information is there. It is OK for the information to be available, but what we really need is for the information to be accessible, right? And accessibility of information is that they are presented in a way that the target audience understand it and can use it to take actions. Thank you very much.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you.
[MARY DUNCAN DAHN]
All right. Thank you. So, to add to what my fellow panelists just mentioned, in order to have our reform services to the least or to those at the local end, we have to ensure that government is able to motivate our staff or those providers at the extreme. So, those providers at the extreme need motivation. There is also a need to strengthen our monitoring and evaluation. And when it comes to services at the lower end, we also have to strengthen supervision. So, once we are able to strengthen supervision, ensure that services at the extreme providers are satisfied, definitely our local end will receive the best services needed. So, we observe in Liberia that part of our supervision, especially when it comes to supervision of those services, are mostly donor driven, and those could be some of the challenges because once there is some issue with the donor, you see that there is relax. There is leniency in carrying on supervision. So, we also encourage that there is budgetary allocation when it comes to supervision for our services at the local end. So, I just thought to add that. Thank you.
[DANIEL ANKRAH]
Thank you. At this juncture, we'd like to formally conclude this program. There will be no further talking. We will now proceed outdoor, where we do a group photo. After which, lunch will be served. Thank you. So, hello. We're going outside for the group photo, and then lunch will be served at the restaurant. Thank you.
