East African Business Week (Kampala)
Jacob Bondia
16 October 2006
Dar Es Salaam — Tanzania's 14 General Budget Support (GBS) donors have expressed satisfaction over the way government is spending development funds.
This will give Tanzania more room to set her expenditure modality on priority sectors instead of donors setting the agenda.
To show their confidence on public expenditure, donors have, in this fiscal year (2006/07), disbursed about 80% of their pledges through GBS.
The GBS is worth US$ 668 million.
The out going chairman of GBS, Mr. Torbjorn Pettersson of Sweden, told journalists last week at a preparation of GBS annual review, that Tanzania will be setting development agenda.
"The donors' role will concentrate on discussion of issues and challenges of executing the set modality," Pettersson said.
He said they were wrong to set modality for the country's development priorities which were difficult to implement. He said modalities set by donors caused confusion in the war against poverty.
Pettersson, who is also a development counsellor at Sweden Embassy in Dar es Salaam, said, "Let's be sincere. These modalities were never tried in any part of the world before."
The future role of 11 donor countries and three institutions would be to check GBS accountability and discussing the real issues and challenges.
The donor countries are Canada , Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom . The institutions are African Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Commission.
The country' budget in this fiscal year is 40 per cent dependent on donors.
The Ministry of Finance Deputy Permanent Secretary, Ms. Joyce Mapunjo, said due to transparency and accountability in handling budget accounts in this fiscal year, the government had received 80 per cent of the BSG.
"This shows that donors are happy with our ways of handling development and expenditure accounts," he said.
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