Public Financial Management for PRSP - Deutsches Institut für ...

Public Financial Management for PRSP Implementation in Malawi
— The compensation package is not transparent due to various forms of
allowances and benefits.
The incentives for civil servants to work in rural districts are especially low.
Many are reluctant to take on government posts in rural areas because living
and working conditions are less attractive than in urban areas. Several key
positions are being transferred to districts or are newly created as ongoing
measure in the decentralisation process. This makes it even more important to
improve the incentive structure for qualified civil servants to work in these
areas.
Insufficient delegation of tasks and responsibilities
Civil servants in senior positions tend to be reluctant to delegate tasks and
responsibilities to lower staff levels. They perceive lower level staff as not
having sufficient abilities to follow procedures and instructions and carry out
the delegated tasks to their satisfaction. This occurs at central and local as
well as between government levels and potentially leads to work overload for
senior staff. But it also implies that lower level staff have few opportunities to
gain additional work experience and improve their skills through learning by
doing. Contributing to this phenomenon are also the many vacant government
positions in middle level management.
A similar mechanism applies to the ongoing devolution process in Malawi.
Many stakeholders in central government institutions are reluctant to devolve
functions to local government levels because they have concerns regarding
the capacity of staff in district secretariats and assemblies.
Lack of effective capacity development and professional skills
Conversations with different stakeholders at both central and local government
level revealed a significant lack of effective capacity development and
professional skills throughout the public sector. This is in part because recruitment
in the public sector in Malawi does not always seem to select candidates
strictly based on their merit. As a number of interview partners
stressed, on-the-job training cannot substitute basic education in the principles
of accounting, for example. In addition, once employed, civil servants
are frequently inadequately trained and prepared for their tasks, especially
when new policies and PFM tools are introduced. A prominent example was
the introduction of Activity Based Budgeting (ABB) at local level. Local staff
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