Budget and Administration

Data for Fiscal Year 2006

Figures 1 and 2 provide data on expenditures under the BPRP in FY06, and in comparison to previous years. As shown in Figure 1, Niger benefited from the highest share (27.2%) of funds disbursed in FY06 due to the completion of a new household survey as well as to a range of requests from the PRSP unit and Ministries for analytical work and capacity building in order to implement the PRSP and prepare a revised PRSP (this included macroeconomic work, a participatory poverty assessment, an evaluation of selected health policies, a small survey on access to electricity and water, and work requested by the unit in charge of the Rural Development Strategy for a Medium Term Expenditure Framework and for the impact of the water management projects implemented by the Special Program of the President of the Republic). After Niger, the next largest recipients were the DRC (17.2%) and Burundi (15.2%), two countries which finalized their first full PRSP in the summer of 2006, a task for which a higher level of support under the BPRP was required. Mozambique and Mali each received slightly more than 11% of the total funding. The expenditure for Rwanda and for sub-regional activities each accounted for about 9% of the total. For sub-regional activities, expenditure data include the work in Burkina Faso, a country that was part of the initial partner countries for the BPRP and were a number of projects are being finalized.

Figure 2 provides data on expenditures under the BPRP in FY06, and in comparison to previous years. In FY06, expenditure amounted to a total of US$ 2,355,159, a level slightly below that reached in FY05. Given that the total allocation committed by the donor for 3 years during the 2004 annual consultation was Euro 6 million (corresponding roughly to US$7.5 million given prevailing exchange rates), the level of spending was in line with the baseline target level of spending of about US$2.5 million per year. At the beginning of each year and on the basis of proposals submitted for funding and approved by a committee representative of various networks from the Africa region and by the donor, a notional allocation is provided to each country, with each country receiving in principle a budget of a similar order of magnitude. At a baseline target level of spending of US$ 2.5 million, after accounting for the cost of field-based ETC poverty economists and after allocating roughly 20 percent of the funds to sub-regional activities, the allocation per country is of the order of US$ 250,000 to US$ 300,000. In practice, disbursements may be faster in some countries than others, depending on opportunities as well as other factors. In addition, due to the availability of some balance of funding from previous years, it would be feasible to allow higher disbursements for the BPRP during one or two years than $2.5 million per year.