Burundi, Sustainable Development through Improved Local Governance

Objective

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

To achieve this, the project works to strengthen the mandate of local governments and improve the legal and fiscal framework, in partnership with the Association of Burundi Communes (ACO-Burundi). It also focuses on improving the relationship between communes and citizens through more transparent and accountable leadership, and on strengthening local policies and procedures for own source revenue.

These efforts are designed to help communes finance their development plans and create budgets that reflect the needs of their citizens. This, in turn, enables them to deliver better basic services.

Approach

In Burundi a negative spiral has occurred in which low accountability and limited responsiveness from local authorities lead to low levels of trust among citizens. This reduces people’s willingness to pay local taxes and fees. As a result, communes have fewer financial resources, which limits their ability to provide services and implement policies. This further weakens trust between communities and local government.

To break this cycle, SDLG takes an integrated approach that combines governance and resource mobilisation. The programme brings together social and technical measures, including leadership training, Community Score Cards, participatory budgeting, youth engagement, and the 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.