WASHINGTON, June 26, 2014 – The World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved a US$50 million IDA* grant on June 24, 2014 to help the Government of Mozambique (GoM) improve the transparency and efficiency of spending on medicine distribution, storage, and availability as well as management of school councils, districts, and budget.
The Bank’s Public Financial Management (PFM) for Results Program will be financed through the Performance for Results (P4R) instrument and supports the Government’s PFM for Results Program to deliver improved health and education services. The performance-driven initiative will help government agencies, provinces, and districts carry out PFM reforms that contribute to efficient allocation, appropriate use, transparency of and accountability for resources.
“I’m pleased to note that we have reached an important milestone in this project lifecycle. Strong PFM and accountability systems are critical for greater development results,” said Mark R. Lundell, World Bank Country Director for Mozambique. “Improvements in the supply chain of medicine availability and in school management will result in better service delivery to the people, especially to the poor who tend to be greatly affected by inefficiencies in those systems.”
This Program will focus on improving the efficiency and transparency of service delivery systems, through improved government coordination, introduction of performance based allocations, and by instituting demand driven capacity building programs. This combination of incentives and capacity building is expected to motivate and enable positive change in the health and education systems. The Program will seek to improve the performance of medicine supply chain, contributing to improved availability of medicines in over 1,300 health centers nationally. In addition, it will increase the effectiveness of school-based management in 4,348 “complete primary schools,” which are relatively larger schools teaching years 1 – 7 and accounting for 63 percent of primary schools in the country. These ‘complete primary schools’ provide a potential for greater impact of the education system through improved management.
“Improved PFM will contribute to better allocation, use and accountability for resources, and to more efficient translation of these resources into results. This new operation’s focus on results provides a platform to engage and align the Ministry of Finance and sector ministries through joint identification of disbursement-linked indicators that emphasize the link between improved PFM and service delivery outputs,” said Furqan Ahmad Saleem, World Bank Task Team Leader for the project. “The Bank’s financing support will allow the Government to use a results-based approach to align the incentives of supply chain and education sector units, and to motivate behavior change.”
Through this program, the Bank will support the government through activities such as start-up costs for the medicines supply chain and management of complete primary schools. It will also help create ways to enhance the cooperation between the ministries of finance, education, and health. Using performance based allocations the program will promote services in the areas of health and education and contribute to improve their ability to identify and resolve problems that hinder the achievement of results.
This operation is aligned with the Bank’s overall development goal of contributing to poverty reduction and supports the Government of Mozambique’s development priorities, particularly in the education and health sectors.
