The African Development Bank held a capacity-building workshop on disbursement procedures for financial staff at implementation units of all its projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The workshop, held 26 - 27 May 2025 in Kinshasa, was initiated by the Bank's Disbursements Division, in collaboration with the Bank Group's DRC country office. Participants included project coordinators, administrative and financial managers, accountants and staff in charge of the Bank's portfolio in the Cellule de Suivi des Projets et Programmes (CSPP, Project and Programme Monitoring Unit), which works within the Congolese Ministry of Finance. The training course consisted of four modules, and issues addressed included the Bank's disbursement policies and procedures, different disbursement methods, as well as respective tools and reports. The workshop concluded with a quiz to monitor how well the participants had learned the training lessons.
According to Alfred Eby, senior disbursement officer and training facilitator, the aim of the workshop was to help staff to shorten substantially time needed for invoice processing by the implementation units, to greatly reduce the rejection rate of payment requests, and to improve the quality of requests transmitted to the Bank. The training offered participants the necessary skills to carry out essential checks at their level. "The workshop was a clear success, with a 60 percent pass rate in the aptitude test," Eby said.
The training helped participants to review disbursement procedures which were poorly understood previously, opening up new operational perspectives. Alexis Sangui Matanda, coordinator of the second phase of the Priority Air Safety Project (PPSA II) in the DRC, commented. "The general principles of the Bank's disbursement policy seemed complicated to me. This workshop has made everything clearer. In our country, disbursement is by direct payment, but this training introduced us to other disbursement and reimbursement approaches, which are a real gain."
Zawadi Muké, administrative and financial manager at the Cellule des infrastructures (Infrastructure Unit), which manages several projects, including three financed by the Bank in the DRC, emphasized: "This training helped us to identify approaches for improving the processing of payment files, with a view to considerably reducing processing times."
Improvement of the disbursement rate is a key performance indicator for projects. The training organizers stressed that impact of the workshop will be measured at the end of the coming quarter through a new analysis of disbursement performance, as recorded in projects financed by the Bank.
As a side event, staff in charge of financial management and accounting for all active Bank projects in the DRC benefited from training on loan closing processes in anticipation of the 2025 closure of a number of Bank Group projects in the country.
The participants received certificates at the end of the training, attesting their ability to manage the disbursement processes for projects financed by the Bank Group in the DRC.
