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Public expenditure and service delivery in Africa
October 2006
United Nations - Economic Commission for Africa
Sound public expenditure management is essential for efficient service delivery. It requires institutions to ensure compliance of services provided with the legal, regulatory and procedural framework as well as delivery of services in the desired amount and quality. Around the world many governments are falling short of ensuring adequate health, education, water and sanitation at various levels. At the macroeconomic level, public spending has only a weak relationship with outcomes. Evidence indicates that increased public spending on health may not lead to significant reductions in child and infant mortality, while increased public spending on education has no important effect on primary school completion rates. At the microeconomic level only a small fraction of government spending usually reaches frontline service providers and the quality of service is often poor.
To address the resource constraints and make more resources available for public service delivery, institutions for the allocation and management of government expenditure need to be adequately developed or strengthened. Data for 1990-2001 showed that on average budget allocations in Sub-Saharan Africa did not reach the benchmark of 20 per cent of the government budget earmarked for education and 15 per cent earmarked for health. Moreover, many African governments are unable to achieve adequate and sustainable levels of investment in infrastructure that can be ultimately financed from domestic resources.
In addition to a massive scaling up of public investments, capacity-building and domestic and external resource mobilization, the majority of African countries need to make public expenditure more effective and deliver services more efficiently in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially in relation to education and health. It is for example estimated that sub-Saharan Africa has to triple its health workforce, adding more than one million workers to reach the health related MDGs.
Keywords: public expenditure, service delivery
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