Burundi, Sustainable Development through Improved Local Governance

Objective

The SDLG project in Burundi strives to promote more accountable, responsive and inclusive local governance in the four provinces of Rutana, Bururi, Makamba and Cibitoke.

To achieve this, the project plans to enhance the overall mandate and legal and fiscal framework of local governments in partnership with the Association of Burundi Communes (ACO-Burundi), improve the social contract between communes and citizens through more accountable and transparent leadership and improve the local policies and procedures on own source revenue. These advancements must contribute to communes that are able to finance their local development plans and budgets that are responsive to their citizen’s needs, positioning them to provide better basic services.

Approach

There is a negative spiral in Burundi of low accountability and responsiveness of local authorities leading to low trust and willingness to pay, which in turn leads to low (financial) capacity to implement policies and provide services because of communes’ dependence on own source revenue, increasing further the distrust between community and local government. SDLG proposes therefore an integrated approach to inclusive governance and resource mobilisation combining social and technical components, such as leadership training, Community Score Cards, Participative Budgeting, youth involvement and digitalisation of financial management.

Results

The first phase of the programme focused on capacity strengthening of ACO-Burundi. Some important results showing the increased capacity of ACO-Burundi were the approval of the national guide on participative budgeting, training 8 communes on the use of a bookkeeping software and transparent financial management and the use of the accountability tool Community Score Cards, combining local authorities and civil society in frameworks for dialogue to improve the quality of services provided by the communes.