Budget transparency is improving significantly in several of the member countries of the WAEMU and CEMAC regions1 and 2, according to the 2015 Open Budget Survey (OBS). Gains made by these countries are reflected in the number and type of budget documents made available – see CABRI’s Budget Enquirer. We are pleased that such remarkable progress is being made by many of the countries that have participated in CABRI's transparency programme.

The 2015 OBS scores for Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Senegal improved by 20 or more points between 2012 and 2015. Of the 102 countries that completed the 2015 survey, only 11 countries improved by a similar margin.

Is it a coincidence that five of these 11 countries come from the WAEMU and CEMAC regions? The answer to this question was addressed at an IBP workshop held in Washington DC in July 2016. Representatives from civil society and government agencies from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DRC, Senegal and Niger participated in the workshop. The purpose was to unpack the factors that driving these improvements and the steps needed to ensure further progress.

A key factor behind the improvements are a set of public financial management reform directives that member countries of WAEMU and CEMAC are committed to implement within an agreed timeframe. The directive requiring each of the regional communities to adopt transparency ‘standards’, has been especially significant. The political compact between countries appears to have helped focus attention on budget transparency and provide the pressure to reform.

Nevertheless, this does point to an interesting question for CABRI. Is compliance to the WAEMU directive on budget transparency sufficient for fostering effective particpation in the budget process? CABRI believes that reforms are likely to gain more traction when governments and local agents take a view that their systems need changing because of a prevailing problem, and not just because systems should move towards global or regional standards.

In 2012, Benin obtained an OBS score of 1. Three years later the country recorded a score of 45, topping the list of the eight francophone African countries covered by the 2015 survey. Between 2012 and 2015, improving transparency became a matter of national pride. A national committee, led by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, was set up to define an action plan to improve Benin’s score. It is only as a result of this action plan that the WAEMU directives targeting transparency were transposed into domestic law. Mr. Rodrigue Chaou, Director General of Budget in the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Benin explained, “the WAEMU directives focusing on transparency were easier to transpose into national law once the different stakeholders realised that this was a necessary step towards a common goal. By delaying the transposition, the government was able to design a law tailored to our context.”