Essossinam Pali, Coffi Cyprien Aholou, François Paul Yatta
Since 2019, Togo has resolutely engaged in the decentralization process marked by communalization and elections of municipal councilors. Financial autonomy constitutes an essential lever for the free administration of municipalities, allowing them to ensure decision-making and the implementation of development projects. However, despite a legal and regulatory framework defining taxation specific to local authorities, Togolese municipalities are often perceived as needing more financial resources. This study aims to map the financing mechanisms for decentralization in Togo and analyze their contribution to municipal budgets. By adopting a quantitative approach combining documentary analysis and interviews with 188 experts and practitioners of local finance from various Togolese structures, four main financing mechanisms were identified: local, national, Community, and international. Among these mechanisms, own resources (in particular from the sale of products and services, fiscal and non-fiscal taxes) and state transfers via the Support Fund for Local Authorities emerge as the primary sources of financing for municipalities. However, the study reveals that several instruments of local mechanisms, although institutionally defined, still need to be updated in many municipalities, thus limiting their effectiveness in resource mobilization. These results highlight the importance of optimizing the management of local mechanisms to strengthen municipalitiesâ financial autonomy and support territoriesâ sustainable development.
East African countries referred to have the effective extension system in Africa. However, the agriculture sector has not shown significant improvement in production and bettering peoplesâ lives in rural areas. In Tanzania, agricultural extension system remains almost entirely financed by the public sector represented by the government through the Ministry of Agriculture. Extension services provided by the Government of Tanzania are publicly funded and, thus, free for farmers employing several extension systems and approaches including the gradual improvement in farming methods, the transformation approach, the settlement scheme and the Training and Visit (T&V) system. Decentralization of extension services in Tanzania introduced with the aim of bringing services closer to farmers. However, the impact of decentralization of extension services in improving farmersâ lives has been perceived mostly with failure than with success. Additionally, performance of extension services in the country reported to be affected by numerous factors such as inefficient funding, poor organization at Local Government Authorities (LGAs), coordination and management, political interference environment, and weak linkage with research sector among others. In addition, the insufficient number of staff and poor infrastructures and facilities, government extension agents reach only 10% of the farming households, leading to dissatisfaction with rendered services among farmers. However, Governmentâs apparent commitment to policies and strategies in transforming the agriculture sector as it employs more than 70% of its population. Thus, recently, the central government provided motor bikes, iPad and soil scanners to all extension workers throughout the country. Hence, this review on the performance of agriculture extension services under local government authorities was conducted to articulate challenges facing the system and propose solutions to achieve the traditional âstructural transformationâ whereby increasing agricultural production provides a platform for manufacturing and economic growth.
Between 2000 and 2011, the military-political and civil crises undermined the implementation of various local development projects in CĂŽte dâIvoire. After crises, funding difficulties became even more acute. Decentralized communities, which have already been faced with shrinking budgets since 1980, are struggling to meet the needs expressed by local people. Faced with such a reality, decentralized cooperation would seem to be an effective and appropriate approach. However, this approach remains unknown and unexplored by the majority of elected officials in CĂŽte dâIvoire. The objective of the article is to show that in the Abidjan District Municipality of Yopougon, decentralized cooperation has made it possible to finance and implement development projects at the local level.
During the past 20 years, substantial efforts were made to improve irrigation Management-Operation & Maintenance (MOM) through introduction of participatory irrigation management (PIM). PIM proved generally successful on small and medium schemes but it has yielded limited results on large schemes. Stakeholder engagement in irrigation system shapes hydrosocial territories: (1) by reducing tension between stakeholders, (2) by redirecting regional planning and strategy, (3) by highlighting water crises, (4) by decentralizing water responsibilities and (5) by integrating values and beliefs from different stakeholders (Sandra Ricart, et.al, 2018). Privatization started to become politically fashionable in the late 1980. In this context privatization means off-loading government ownership or responsibility for operation into the private sector, either to the farmers themselves or to an intermediate private subcontractor. But is it just a means of off-loading responsibility from a government line management system that can't cope, or is it really to benefit the farmers? (Adrian Laycock, 2011). Barind Multipurpose Development Authority (BMDA) is an autonomous authority. The BMDA does not require external finance and sustainable finance to operate the irrigation project. There are around 16,000 deep tube wells and surface lift pumps covering around 0.6 million hectares (round the year) under BMDA management. BMDA is managed by a board chaired by an appointee of the government. There are three other members representatives from farmers including other relevant department's representatives. BMDA has introduced innovative concept for prepayment for water; this was started using a system of using electronic prepaid meters. There are no formal WUOs established instead keeps a very close liaison with the farmers and the communities through their field offices, this approach appears to be effective. The chief executive of a successful irrigation project should have a clear idea about people, land and water.
The article looks at the proving process in mathematics from a didactic perspective. The study seeks to identify what metamathematics knowledge is at stake when mathematicians produce proof of implications with universal quantifiers. For this reason, we propose a modelling of the proof process â from the manipulation of examples to the finished product â based on dialogic logic tools. This modelling leads us to a characterization of the enunciative position which is needed to elaborate proofs. The results are derived from two cases: one in arithmetic integers, another in plane geometry. Their comparison allows us to discuss the limits of a transversal approach to this meta-mathematical knowledge without taking into account the specificity of mathematical fields.
This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into how democratic municipalities in Dakar, Senegal are formed and reformed. The municipal scale of government has long been both a modern norm and a central object of governmental reform throughout the Francophone world. Established in the late 19th century as a colony of France, Dakar is one of the oldest local democracies in Africa and remains today a model of democratic reform for municipal governments across the continent. In 2013, the Senegalese legislature passed what is known colloquially as Act III of decentralization. This national reform legally delegated political and fiscal authority to Senegalâs lowest level of territorial administrationâthe communeâinaugurating what the law itself referred to as the âcomplete communalization of the national territoryâ. Yet far from resolving the problem of communal form, the Act III incited a novel set of experiments in communal authority. This dissertation reveals a broader terrain of democratic politics and reform that is beyond the more familiar domains of law and public debate. I examine the novel set of experimental techniques that have emerged out of critical reflections on the problem of communal form in Dakar. Posing the communal form as contested problem-space, I follow a range of experiments through which diverse actors make sense of how public authority should be distributed across Dakarâs urban terrain. To analyze the politics of this distribution, I develop the concept of municipal state formation: the set of techniques through which sub-national governments take on functions of the sovereign nation and exercise legitimate authority over citizens, populations, publics, and territory. Yet this dissertation does not demonstrate how communes have arrived, once and for all, fully formedâor, as the Senegalese laws describe it, âfully empoweredâ. Municipal state formation is never complete; it is an ongoing process of experimentation, disagreement, and piecemeal reform. In the wake of Act III, most communal officials articulated a commonly held critique: the laws had devolved new responsibilities, but without the necessary revenues to match. There was, in other words, a persistent mismatch between political and fiscal decentralization. For this reason, I examine fiscal administration as a particularly consequential political terrain in which the problem of communal form took shape in Dakar.This dissertation is organized into five substantive chapters and a conclusion. After introducing the concept of municipal state formation, the second chapter reveals how a French colonial policy of assimilation provided the political conditions for the legal constitution communes in Senegal. But these laws were also formed in relation to a longstanding dispute over the fiscal administration of the communes. The third chapter turns to one such dispute over Dakarâs municipal bond program. Although the program was ultimately sabotaged by the central state, it introduced a novel political terrain into this long-standing dispute over fiscal administration: public financial evaluation. I argue that such evaluations made an appeal to an audience beyond the courtsâwhat I term, a financial publicâto assert the Cityâs claim to municipal authority. The fourth chapter examines a similarly unsuccessful experiment to re-distribute public authority in Dakar. In partnership with a private firm, municipal authorities constructed a commercial center in which to relocate thousands of Dakarâs walking street vendors. The program introduced a familiar form of a neoliberal fiscal contract: the user-fee. However, vendors disagreed with the poor location and high cost of the building, and unequivocally refused to relocate. In this chapter, I argue that this failed neoliberal program provided the conditions under which vendorsâ refusal became a possible and effective political act, successfully delimiting when and where municipal authority was legitimately exercised in Dakar.The final chapter returns to a more traditional aspect of public authority: the right to tax. Although Act III supposedly delegated several new local taxes, bureaucrats and officials nevertheless had to experiment with novel techniques of rule to exercise communal authority on the ground. One local commune pushed the limits of communal rights to enforce tax collection by drawing on the mayorâs public reputation for violence. The Mayorâs reputation as an armed murderer with a âflare for the aggressiveâ shaped how and where street-level bureaucrats collected taxes. Tax collection thus became more than an accounting of the physical landscape: it was a technique of territorial control grounded in a reputation for unlawful violence.This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how the concept of municipal state formation may be extended to cities far from Dakar. To make this comparative case, I briefly analyze the problem of metropolitan fragmentation in St. Louis, Missouri.
John James Okiror, E. F. Hansen, Bernard Bashaasha, I. Nakendo
This chapter examines the institutional sustainability of internationally financed support for rural climate change adaptation in Uganda. The most common approach for such support is the 'planned climate change adaptation approach', which relies on projects as a mechanism for implementation and governance. This raises two concerns. Firstly, a project mode of implementation frequently establishes structures, procedures and funding mechanisms parallel to those of government, have limited time framework and have been widely criticized and abandoned in development work in favour of participatory planning and decentralized governance structures. Further, this chapter seeks to explore the implications of the skewed funding modality for climate change activities for implementation at the subnational administrative levels. This project mode of implementation centralizes decision making at the ministerial and UN agencies level. However, adaptation measures can best be implemented at the district level in the context of decentralized local governments.
The objective of this article is to analyze the tie between the financings of the Decentralized Financial System (DFS) and the agricultural growth in Senegal. We use a linear equation model. The survey covers the active period of 1999 to 2013. Results show that the Decentralized Financial System has a positive and significant impact on the agricultural GDP in Senegal.
In Benin, between 1970 and 2010, experiments in the areas of rural road construction and maintenance did not yield infrastructure in a permanently good state of repair. The results of these campaigns were inconclusive and accompanied by an observation of incoherent policy regarding rural road construction and maintenance, in addition to noting rather unrealistic mechanisms in place for applying resources to generate the necessary maintenance financing. In light of these policy failures, the National Rural Transport Strategy (or NRTS), designed to acknowledge the nation's decentralization mandate, was adopted. This strategic policy has been in an experimental phase since 2011, and initial results are now available.
Financing Agreement (Decentralized Urban Capacity Building Project) between Burkina Faso and the International Development Association (with schedules, appendix and International Development Association General Conditions for Credits and Grants, dated 1 July 2005, as amended through 15 October 2006). Ouagadougou, 22 June 2007
Financing Agreement (Second Community Based Rural Development Project in support of the National Program for Decentralized Rural Development) between Burkina Faso and the International Development Association (with schedule, appendix and International Development Association General Conditions for Credits and Grants, dated 1 July 2005). Washington, 16 April 2007
This annual progress report reviews the joint staff advisory note on Burkina Fasoâs Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). IMF staff highlights the importance of increasing public revenue mobilization and strengthening expenditure management and efficiency, and securing financing in the form of grants, which would create space for an increase in pro-poor spending. Increasing spending on basic services and enhancing the management and efficiency of public expenditure in health and education, and continued progress on decentralization are critical to achieve the PRS public service delivery targets.
The process of decentralisation and privatization of agricultural extension services in Benin must take into account important issues such as the news actors, including agricultural producer organisations, private sector and NGOs, the reduction in the power of high level extension administration, active participation or stakeholders in the financing of extension service, financial and technical assistance from the State, particularly for resource-limited communes, institutional changes that are adapted to both decentralisation context and local management capacity. In the new decentralised system, agricultural extension needs to be flexible and avoid hierarchical structures Most of the staff should be in the communes and should be oriented towards enhancing the capacity of farmers and the elected local governments to participate in the process of solving their problems and reach their development objectives, including financing of agricultural extension services. To achieve all this, adequate decisionmaking power and resources for extension activities should be transferred to commune level. The experience from Benin indicates the difficulties African countries in general, and Benin in particular, will face when trying to better tune extension activities to local needs.
The note focuses on the leading role of \n local level institutions (LLIs) in Burkina Faso, in rural \n decentralization, and poverty eradication, to enhance \n equitable prosperity. It is based on the study undertaken by \n the National Decentralization Commission in Burkina Faso, \n which draws on case studies in Sanmatenga, Sissili, Houet, \n and Yatenga, and, presents sociological evidence that \n certain high-performing LLIs contribute to equitable \n economic development. Economic findings support this, \n showing that both lower inequality levels, and lower poverty \n levels, are linked to a high degree of internal village \n organization. Contextually, LLIs surround, connect, and \n manage communities, incorporating many different kinds of \n indigenous organizations, and functions. Three categories of \n institutions active at the local level are identified: value \n institutions, which focus on activating, and maintaining the \n stability of local governance, and values of the society; \n production institutions, focused on accessing resources from \n the national government, so as to increase productivity; \n and, service-asset management institutions, which integrate \n productivity, and growth values, focused on managing, and \n expanding local assets for sustainable development. External \n aid will need to map these LLIs to guide pro-poor \n investment, and financing of community driven development, \n and encourage local governments to formalize participation.
The rehabilitation of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the last few years has occasioned bitter fights between several ethnic groups. The article analyses the practical and symbolical means used by the Portorican population in order to appropriate a space they considered as being theirs. The cultural factor is a stake in itself as each ethnic group endeavors to mark out and defend a socio-historical « turf. » Symbolic conflicts may conceal other interests â they are nonetheless an end in itself. Political elements are present, too, but the way in which they come between the fighters is proof that the solutions arrived at are at best temporary.