Project to support the Palestinian Public Finance Institute (PPFI)

The soundness of public finances is a major issue for Palestine, in terms of both ensuring income and financing public policies. The authorities have implemented several successive reforms with the aim of improving public finance management, increasing revenue mobilisation and enhancing public policy financing.

Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and Expertise France are working to support the Palestinian Public Finance Institute (PPFI) and meet the needs of the Ministry of Finance via a project that aims to conduct a high-level technical dialogue with Palestinian institutions. The objective is to develop training tools for public finance management in line with international practices and suited to the specific context in Palestine.

This long-term technical assistance is contributing to building the capacities of the Palestinian authorities in terms of public finance management and illustrates the quality of the partnership between Palestine and France.

The project is based on three objectives:

• Objective 1: extend the training provision of the PPFI, with a focus on the public finance management reform and in the priority areas of the Ministry of Finance;

• Objective 2: contribute to a common professional culture in all the public finance management institutions and to effectively raising public awareness of these issues;

• Objective 3: build the capacities of the staff involved in the training cycle at the PPFI and Ministry of Finance.

For further reading: Contributing to improving public finances in Palestine: A new project to support the Public Finance Institute

1) Supporting the development of e-learning 

The PPFI and Ministry of Finance have until now mainly used face-to-face training. The PPFI has had to develop e-learning training due to the time constraints for setting up training and the need to regularly refresh the knowledge of public officials. These new modules provide tools and allow the training activities to continue despite the travel restrictions. 

In cooperation with experts from the Centre national de la fonction publique territoriale (CNFPT), the project is contributing to developing online training modules at the Ministry of Finance for target activities: rights of the civil service, gender, internal organisation of the Ministry of Finance, budget preparation, public procurement, etc.

The objective of this area of operation is to build the capacities of trainers, set up an online training platform and its related modules and review existing training modules in order to adapt them to the digital format so that they can be delivered online or mixed (online and face-to-face).

2) Promote gender mainstreaming in public finance 

In early 2019, a gender unit was set up in the Palestinian Ministry of Finance. The objective of this unit is to support training and awareness-raising on gender issues at the Ministry of Finance, but also the integration of these issues in the public finance management of other ministries.

As part of this project, Expertise France organised an awareness-raising seminar on gender issues for the staff of the Ministry of Finance. It gathered 40 participants with various levels of responsibility and awareness and gave rise to fruitful discussions to improve gender mainstreaming in the Ministry’s activities.

This first seminar made it possible to launch more in-depth work to mainstream the gender dimension into the budget preparation of several sectoral ministries, including the Ministry of Education and Ministry of the Economy.

In the longer term, the objective is to develop a new training module on gender responsive budgeting (GRB).

The technical assistance is largely based on the mobilisation of French public expertise, mainly from the Public Finances Directorate General (DGFiP).

The general diagnostic conducted in 2018 allowed the experts to establish a detailed work plan to meet the needs of the Palestinian Ministry of Finance. The experts from DGFiP have been working on two key issues since 2019:

• Risk management: raising awareness of the utility of an enhanced mechanism to manage activities and risks;

• The taxation of e-commerce: capacity building and creation of training modules on this subject.

The PPFI is cooperating with Palestinian universities to prepare students in public administration and public finances. This partnership focuses on several areas:

• Extensive awareness-raising on the bases of public finance management (PFM): functioning of the PFM system, role of the Ministry of Finance and Government, public spending circuit, etc.

• Capacity building for students in certain academic specialisations, such as finance, accounting and public administration;

• Academic development to allow students that will become officials to hold existing and changing positions in the PFM sector.

More specifically, the PPFI has established partnerships with two Palestinian universities:

• Birzeit University: introduction of courses on the fundamentals of public finances for students from finance and accounting departments to give them a practical vision of the actual issues encountered in PFM in Palestine.

• Palestinian Technical University – Kadoorie (PTUK): introduction of courses on the fundamentals of public finances to give students more long-term training. An internship programme may be set up to finalise the training directly in the Ministry.