The Honorable Members of Parliament as well as some parliamentary staff received, from October 3 to 6, 2022 in Ngozi, a capacity building workshop on the implementation and operationalization of the program budget. The training workshop was organized by the Burundian Parliament in partnership with the Swiss Cooperation Office in Burundi. The parliamentarians, having the mission of controlling the Government actions, needed to harmonize their knowledge on the implementation and operationalization of the program budget.

They therefore analyzed together the legal framework that implements and operationalizes the program budget. This is mainly found in the organic law of June 22, 2022 on public finance and its application texts.

Through this training, the Members of Parliament were able to learn about all the steps of results-based management (RBM) and its implementation tools. Planning, programming, budgeting and monitoring and evaluation were also the focus of the training.

Thus, the parliamentarians had the opportunity to analyze together the different national planning documents such as the National Development Plan (NDP), the sectorial policies at the level of the ministries and the strategic plans of the ministries.

The People’s Elected Representatives also had the opportunity to analyze the formats and components of the Priority Action Plans (PAP) and the Annual Work Plans and Budget (AWPB) of the different ministries.

In this training workshop, the results chain and associated indicators for each level were also analyzed. This included a good understanding of the concepts of impact, outcomes, results, activities and inputs. Each level of the results chain is associated with indicators. Thus, the difference between impact, outcome, output or product indicators and input indicators was well understood by the parliamentarians.

The tools and terminology used in the implementation and operationalization of the program budget monitoring and evaluation system were also the target of the training. Thus, the parliamentarians learned how to do the monitoring-evaluation of the program-budget in their missions of control of the Government actions.

The production and analysis of dashboards for output indicators and performance frameworks for outcome and impact indicators in the context of monitoring Government actions were also addressed in the training.

Rationalism, effectiveness and efficiency are the foundations of the planning, programming, budgeting and monitoring-evaluation process. All these subjects were reviewed during the training of the parliamentarians.

At the end of the training, general recommendations were formulated and other recommendations were addressed to the Parliament and the Government of Burundi for an effective and efficient implementation of the program budget.

To the Parliament, it was recommended, among other things, to accompany the implementation of all national planning documents, to monitor the implementation of the program budget in all communes and to supervise the communes so that they can collect a lot of revenue that will enable them to carry out their projects.

To the Government of Burundi, it was recommended to set up a steering and monitoring-evaluation body for the program budget, to conduct the pilot phase of digitalizing the program budget as soon as possible, to make the program budget operational in all the country’s institutions and to develop a roadmap for the implementation and operationalization of the program budget, to give a place of choice to the private sector for increased economic growth and to support and strengthen good governance actions for the mobilization of funds for the implementation of the National Development Plan over the period of 2023-2027