SFTAS Toolkits: Consultant Guide

Abstract

The objective of the World Bank’s State Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability (SFTAS) Program is to promote focus and attention of Nigerian States towards improvement of their PFM systems, processes and institutions. Such support is aimed at strengthening fiscal transparency to help build trust in government, facilitating accountability in public resource management and ensuring sustainability in the participating states. The SFTAS Program is a hybrid with two components of activities that support Nigerian states to achieve key result areas of the program: i. ‘Results-based’ component – a Performance for Results (PforR) or performance-based financing component that is open ex-ante to all 36 states in Nigeria. This component provides annual performance-based grants to states which have met the annual eligibility criteria and achieved the annual disbursement-linked indicators (DLI); and ii. Technical assistance component – for states and selected national-level institutions. The Program will support the full and sustained implementation of a strategic subset of reforms from the 22-point Fiscal Sustainability Plan (FSP) and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) commitments that are implemented at the state level. This component is implemented using the guiding principles of Investment Project Financing (IPF). The PforR Program has selected 22 action points from the FSP that are considered the most critical and impactful for improving the financial management and fiscal performance of State Governments. A performance based framework has been developed to measure fiscal performance, transparency and accountability among State Government, and to incentivize superior performance through a system of conditional grants to well-performing State Governments. Such framework is detailed in the SFTAS Annual Performance Assessment (APA) guidelines and verification protocol (latest version dated August 2019), which provides the details of what states need to do to meet the eligibility criteria and achieve the disbursement-linked indicators (DLIs).