About Financial Transparency and Accountability (FTA)

In an effort to enhance decentralized public service delivery to the poor, the Government of Ethiopia and Development Partners embarked on a new mechanism known as Protection of Basic Services (PBS) since 2006. The PBS project had been supporting Ethiopia’s progress towards the improvement of basic service delivery in the health, education, agriculture, and water and sanitation sectors at the local level by supporting the block grant transfers to regions and woredas followed by Enhancing Shared Prosperity through Equitable Services (ESPES) program and it’s Additional Financing (ESPES-AF). 

The two successive programs also aimed to strengthen accountability systems at the decentralized levels by supporting capacity developments in public finance management and implementation of citizen engagement initiatives. Both PBS and ESPES programs have Citizen Engagement sub-components, namely, Financial Transparency and Accountability (FTA), Social Accountability (SA) and Grievance Redress Mechanism (GRM).

The objective of FTA is to improve transparency and accountability around public budget processes (budget preparation, allocation, execution and audits) at the Federal, Regional/city Administration and Woreda administration levels, by developing various tools such as budget and expenditure templates, budget literacy training manuals, procurement and audit templates, the media disclosure and other traditional and cultural mechanisms.

Over the last several years, these FTA tools have been refined and used by regions and woredas to enhance citizens’ understanding and engagement in the budget process. Pre-budget discussion guidelines have also been developed and disseminated to regions and woredas to create forums on which community representatives provide their views on future priority and service delivery issues based on the assessment of previous year’s budget implementation.

 Starting from 2017, the Government of Ethiopia also introduced the Financial Transparency and Accountability concept to the regional and federal level institutions and issued a directive to implement FTA at the federal and regional levels to mainstream the initiative in all public institutions. Accordingly, significant achievements have been registered in the area of boosting citizens' understanding on government budget process, accessibility of public budget information and citizens’ participation on local government budgeting, planning and implementation. As a result, Ethiopia become a member International Budget Partners (IPB) since 2020 and budget transparency survey will be done soon to rank the country in its level of transparency internationally.

Implementation Arrangement

Financial Transparency and Accountability is implemented by Ministry of Finance nationally and Regional Bureau of Finance and Economic Developments are responsible to implement  the initiative region wide. The project is financially and technically supported by the World Bank (WB). Implementation is through all government tiers ( from federal to woreda level) in which, Expenditure Management Reform Directorate has managed the overall implementation at federal and region wide through its team and at regional/city administration  level, FTA focal persons in  BOFED coordinate the implementation.  To ensure accountability and transparency in public basic service delivery sectors, FTA is implemented in collaboration with the other citizens engagement components (Social Accountability-SA and Grievance Redress mechanisms-GRM).

Contact Us

Dawit Shemels

Director Expenditure management and control program Directorate

Ministry of finance

Cell phone +251-911197450

daetse@gmail.com

Solomon Tsegaye

FTA Team Coordinator

Cell phone:+251-911946399

Email- solotsgy@yahoo.com

Yemenzework awgichew

Cell phone +251-911966878

Email-yemenzworkac@gmail.com

FTA Team Coordinator

Fikru Tebeje

Senior FTA Expert

Cell phone: +251-917804845

Email-fikrutebeje@gmail.com

Tariku Abebe

Senior FTA Expert

Cell phone:-+251-911986974

Email-abebetariku1846