Civil servants in The Gambia may start to reap more benefits for their labour when the development initiatives outlined by a World Bank draft report and a Public Service Reform Sector Strategy Paper are fully recommended and implemented by the government.

The World Bank report, which was evaluated and discussed at a two-day workshop at the Corinthia Atlantic Hotel in Banjul by participants from the public service sector, World Bank, DfID and the UNDP, was undertaken as a study by the World Bank in response to government’s request submitted in January 2007 for a comprehensive capacity assessment in the Public Service Sector, including the pension system.

The report proposes salaries and pension benefits (excluding the 20% salary increase across the board recently authorised by His Excellency the President) to strengthen payroll, establishment control, human resource management and training.

"The purpose of this workshop, in our view, is to critically examine and review the analytic study done by the World Bank/AfDB particularly in the area of Salaries, Allowances and Pension Reform," said the permanent secretary at the Personnel Management Office, Omar G. Sallah, while delivering a statement at the opening ceremony of the workshop on Tuesday.

He said the study should be viewed as a joint one on the basis that most of its "preliminary observations and data are the product of a joint consultations with the Mission [of World Bank] and a Gambian Technical Team" set up for the purpose since 2006.

"The issues highlighted in the data inter alia pointed to deficiencies in government effectives (52% in 2002 to 31% in 2005); quality of service (44% in 2002 to 38% in 2005) and anti-corruption (50% in 2002 to 30% in 2005)," Mr Sallah said.

He added: "The negative trend therefore confirmed the need for a comprehensive reform to enhance efficiency and effective service delivery. It is in this regard, that initiatives were bolstered, through further consultations and workshops for a comprehensive strategy.

"The results of these interventions and consultations were the product of the Public Service Reform Sector Strategy Paper (PSRSSP 2007 – 2011), one of the main components of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSPII 2007 – 2011) submitted to the Bank in January 2007."

PS Sallah further noted that the PSRSSP, which has a total cost package of US$7.5M (excluding salaries, allowances, wages and pensions), focused on four key areas of civil service reform. These, he explained, included improvement of the remuneration package, including Pension Reform to motivate and minimize attrition; strengthening institutional capacity for policy formulation; promotion of ethical values to ensure transparency, accountability and the induction of meritocracy into the service, and development of capacity at the local level for an effective and successful decentralisation of government activities and functions.

The sector strategy, he also said, broadly covers subjects such as Compensation and Benefits, Institutional Capacity Factors, and Governance and Management Factors.

In his keynote address, the Secretary of State for Finance and Economic Affairs, Hon. Mousa Bala Gaye, told participants at the workshop that their main task would be to evaluate and discuss the World Bank study or report and "not to make recommendations.

"Government has to take its time to constitute a taskforce that will review and assess the study in greater detail with a view to making recommendations to the Office of the President which will bring a paper to Cabinet that Cabinet will consider," Hon Bala Gaye told the participants, adding that the Public Service Reform Strategy funded by the UNDP and the civil service reform programme prepared by the World Bank, the African Development Fund and DfID should have been submitted to government since last year.

He explained: "Over the last five years government has been very much concerned with the reform of the civil service. It has taken considerable time to submit these reports to government. We have been working on this. We thought these reports were going to be submitted in June or July of last year.

I wanted the reports to be submitted in November or December last year, it was not possible. The reports are only submitted now."

He said his agreement with the World Bank was to hold two workshops one of which would be to present and explain the civil service programme.  

"I wanted to put this challenge before the workshop. How can we consider, jointly, the UNDP funded civil service reform strategy and also the World Bank-DfiD civil service reform programme study, because I do not want government to be approached with recommendations of the strategy and for decisions to be taken on that in the absence of a consideration of the recommendations of the civil service reform programme study?" he posited, adding:

"Let us try to consider the two documents together and make unified joint recommendations to government on a comprehensive civil service reform programme."

The second issue is on pension, he said. "What we have been seeing is that we have a lot of contributory pension schemes in government which has resulted in very low monthly pensions’ payment for our retired civil servants," the Finance SoS stressed, noting that the "highest monthly pension in this country is about three thousand dalasis a month", while the majority of retired civil servants are receiving less than fifty percent of this amount.

"We have over 800 people having pensions of D 100 and the scale goes on. The people in the D2,000 scale bracket are very few," he said, while noting that the government spent over D200 million in one year in respect of the recent 20% salary increase.

The World Bank Country economist in The Gambia, Mr Hoon Soh, said that although the civil service reform is a difficult and long-term endeavour but the World Bank would continue to support its proper reform process for the benefit of the civil service sector and the Government of The Gambia.

"Civil Service reform has become imperative in The Gambia due to the need to develop an effective and results-oriented civil service to prop the implementation of the country’s development strategy and plans in a sustainable manner," noted the UNDP Resident Representative in The Gambia, Mr Vitalie Muntean, in his remarks on the occasion.