Parliament has passed the $100 million Governance to Enable Service Delivery project. The GESD project is a grant from the World Bank Board of Executive Directors approved in April this year and was pending Parliament’s nod.

Presenting the authorisation bill, Minister of Finance, Honourable Felix Mlusu said the GESD project is a major boost to the Government’s efforts to strengthen Local Authorities performance and service delivery.

Mlusu said the project would be implemented with strict adherence to the approved Project Appraisal Document (PAD).

The Minister said   the GESD project development objective is to “strengthen Local Authorities’ institutional performance, responsiveness to citizens and management of resources for service delivery. The project intends to among others, enhance local authority capacity and finance performance-based grants to 28 District Local Authorities to deliver priority development projects that enhance service delivery.

The bill was supported by all sides of the August House and was unanimously passed without opposition.

GESD is a results-based approach that will incentivize effectiveness and accountability for performance of Local Authorities. The project has four core components; Performance-based Financing for Service Delivery which has $73.2 million allocation, Intergovernmental Accountability Systems which has an allocation of $3.8 million, Performance Improvement Support with an allocation of $18 million and Adaptive Management and Innovation Support with $4 million.

The project has three main indicators which will assist in monitoring if the project is being implemented in line with the main objective which include; Number of local authorities that increase their score on the local authority performance assessment by 5 percentage points; Number of local authorities that complete 80% of the capital investment projects in their annual investment plans and Increased citizen satisfaction through implementation of annual investment plans.

The project will run for a period of 5 years with Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and Development, Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, National Local Government Finance Committee (NLGFC) and Local Authorities as lead implementing agencies.