Equipping communes with qualified and effective tools to harmonize their communal plans with a view to integrating their contents year by year into the General State Budget, was the aim of the workshop to disseminate and validate the model Communal Plan for Community Development (PCDC) and the process of integrating it into the General State Budget 2023-2024, which was solemnly opened by the Speaker of the National Assembly Monday, May 22, 2023 at Kigobe Congress Palace.

In front of Parliament, members of the Government, governors, administrators, permanent executive secretaries, presidents of communal councils and technical advisors in charge of development, the Chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts and Finance, Economic Affairs and Planning proceeded to report to the Executive on preliminary work to monitor Government action in relation to the General State Budget, fiscal year 2023-2024.
Right from the start, the Honorable Nestor Ntahontuye reminded the audience that Burundi’s current planning logic operates on two levels. At sectoral level, the Vision 2025 which projects Burundi as an emerging country through Vision 2040 and a developed country through Vision 2060, has been implemented through the National Development Plan, NDP 2018-2027, which has become the revised NDP 2018-2027. From the NDP 2018-2027 derives in principle 15 sectoral policies, from which are drawn the strategic plans, the number of which depends on the institutions attached to each ministry.

On the other hand, the 15 revised sectoral policies have led to revised strategic plans or new strategic plan depending on the institutions attached to the ministries. At community level, there are 119 Communal Plans for Community Development (PCDC in French acronym). He concluded that the implementation of all these documents is carried out through the General State Budget executed at sector ministry level, the annual budget of communes, the budget of personalized administrations with management autonomy of a social, commercial and industrial nature, the budget of hospitals and the private sector, which must play a very important role in the structural transformation of the economy.

For an operational implementation, these planning documents must benefit from results-based operational implementation and management, based on the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability of the various interventions, he demonstrated, before deploring the variability of content from one commune to another.
To overcome this major challenge, the standing committee responsible for finance has elaborated a model communal community development plan, which will serve as a model for the elaboration of their communal plans. At the end of the first day of that three-day workshop, this model document was approved.
On the second day of the workshop, the technicians in the field which are the communal administrators from all over the country, the Communal Council Office from all over the country, the communal technician in charge of development in each commune, and the permanent secretaries from the various ministries, were on hand. After a brief reminder of the PCDC (Communal Plan for Community Development) tool and the presentation of a model PCDC, they got down to business by drawing a correlation between "their" PCDC and the model PCDC.
The exercise continued on the third and final day of training, with some communal administrators seeing their shares increased by 25.

In addition, the introduction of the notion of program budgeting brings added value to the PCDC, which is evaluated quarterly rather than annually.
This giant step taken by Burundians is an achievement that honors the country, which will now have something to sell in the world, declared the Speaker of the National Assembly in his closing speech. It’s a date that should be forever marked in the history of the country," added the Right Honorable Gelase Daniel NDABIRABE, for whom this major reform, whose performance is calculated on the basis of results, also promotes equal exchanges. This big project, he concluded, also puts an end to the PCDCs that were currently in progress.