By Yusef Taylor, @FlexDan_YT
The National Development Plan (NDP) is the Government’s roadmap to promote national development, with many such roadmaps promulgated by various governments from President Jawara’s ‘Tesito’ to President Jammeh’s ‘Vision 2020’ and now President Adama Barrow’s Yiriwaa. Many will agree that these well-crafted documents promise lofty targets but fail to be fully implemented.
Now the current leadership of President Barrow has launched its second NDP dubbed ‘Yiriwaa’ which translates to development in Mandinka, similarly, President Jawara’s Tesito translates to self-help. But before turning our attention to President Barrow’s second NDP how much of his first NDP has been implemented?
Only 38% of President Barrow’s First NDP Implemented
The 2018 to 2021 NDP was meant to end by 2021 but it was extended for another year and concluded in December 2022. This meant it had more time to reach its eight strategic priorities, however, according to an assessment only 38% of the targets have been achieved and or exceeded. Meanwhile, 31% of the targets were on track while 31% of targets made no progress.
One of the main problems originates from the government’s failure to do things at the right time making it difficult to track implementation of the plan. The first NDP was extended for a year but a full assessment of the NDP 2018 -2021 Implementation has not been published. Similarly, the launch of the second NDP was delayed for over a year. The new Yiriwaa NDP covering 2023 to 2027 was only launched on 9th February 2024, a year after its apparent implementation. By now a first-year assessment of the implementation of the Yiriwaa NDP should be underway.
According to the excerpts of the assessment of the first NDP “the modest increase in performance at end term as compared to mid-term, and the fact that a third of the targets still registered limited progress is indicative of the impact of COVID-19”.
One of the reasons cited in the report for the poor performance is that “the prescribed institutional arrangements to ensure effective and inclusive coordination of plan implementation were not put in place. The implementation of the Plan therefore largely became the exclusive responsibility of government, without the involvement of many key stakeholders, including those at grassroots level”.
In addition to this, “no detailed implementation plans on how to achieve the targets set were drawn up by the respective sectors”. However, the Yiriwaa NDP promises to address these concerns because “the Government has fully considered these shortcomings as well as the recommendations on strengthening participation, accountability and transparency and increased use of domestic resources to finance the country’s development”.
This last part on the need to mobilise domestic resources has been an Achilles heel for the government. The Gambia Government continues to depend on loans and grants to fund its development programs while domestic revenue is spent on recurrent expenditure. The assessment of the previous NDP highlights this problem and President Barrow referred to this in his speech.
First NDP Required US$1.7 Billion, Second US$3.5 Billion
According to the mid-term review of resource mobilisation, “a total of US$1.32 billion was committed to Flagship Projects related to Strategic Priorities; and of this amount 34.6% were loans and 65.4% were grants, 42.1% of this has been disbursed”. Throughout this section of the assessment, no reference is made to how much domestic revenue was committed or disbursed on the first NDP.
The midterm review highlights that on “Critical Enablers, a total of US$48.7 million was committed, of which 36.2% was disbursed. In total therefore, approximately US$1.37 billion was committed and 41.9% was disbursed mid-way in the implementation of NDP 2018-2021”.
This time President Barrow says he wants to do things differently and even avoids using the words loans and grants, opting instead to use the word concessionary funding. During the launching of the Yiriwaa NDP on 9th February 2024 at State House, President Barrow noted that his government is “designing an Integrated National Financing Framework (INFF) under the leadership of the Ministry of Finance”.
Up from the first NDP Budget of US$1.7 Billion this time President Barrow’s Yiriwaa NDP will require “an optimistic funding scenario of US$3.5 billion and a conservative scenario of US$2.8 billion”.
“The optimistic scenario assumes that resources will be available to implement all the priority areas in the Plan. On the contrary, the other scenario assumes that resources would be available to implement only the top priorities in the Plan” noted President Barrow.
Shift from Loans and Grants to Domestic Financing?
Speaking on the importance of financing the Yiriwaa NDP President Barrow revealed that “to address the funding requirements, my government will explore a three-pronged financing strategy: domestic resource mobilisation, innovative financing, and concessionary financing. All of them are geared towards promoting green investments and sustainable development”.
“I will underline domestic mobilisation. I have always been preaching that domestic resource mobilisation is more realistic and there is a lot of donor fatigue in the world. So, the best way forward to develop our country is to mobilise resources locally” said President Barrow.
The way he intends to do this is for “the tax office to intensify, to improve strengthen our domestic resource mobilisation. That’s the only way we can develop this country. It’s more realistic and that is the way forward”.
This year President Barrow’s government has set a target for the Gambia Revenue Authority (GRA) to collect D19.2 Billion which marks a D4 Billion increase from the 2023 target of D15.2 Billion. If both these targets are met a total of D34.4 Billion will be raised domestically. At a rate of D67 GMD to US$1, this translates to approximately US$513 million, half a Billion US Dollars. This highlights how far off target The Gambia’s domestic resource mobilisation is from US$3.5 Billion required for the Yiriwaa NDP.
There is an urgent need for the Government to change its approach to funding the second NDP as the first one was heavily reliant on loans and grants. This is underlined by the fact that of the US$1.32 Billion committed 34.6% were loans and 65.4% were grants meaning that domestic funding accounts for a negligible amount.