ODI Country Partnerships work with governments to build more effective, transparent, and accountable public finance systems.

Institution building takes time and there are no solutions that work in all countries at all times. Our country partnerships support governments to take a problem driven approach to reform, and recognise that capacity building is a long term process where trying and failing is part of finding the right solutions.

Public financial management reforms are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. While our core offering focuses on supporting ministries of finance and other central fiscal institutions to improve how governments raise and spend money, our teams also support reformers to build the coalitions across government needed to find the right solutions to deliver better outcomes for citizens.

We offer strategic advice, help to solve concrete problems, advise on systems design, and provide implementation support. Whilst being informed by comparable experiences elsewhere, we seek to identify ‘good fit’ solutions that are responsive to the context and demands of partner countries, and avoid simply replicating preconceived ‘best practice' models and templates.

Our country partnerships are currently active in Liberia, Mali, Rwanda, and Uganda. In Rwanda and Uganda, our partnerships are part of the Centre for Tax Analysis in Developing Countries (TaxDev) and focus on supporting effective tax policymaking. In Liberia and Mali, we provide support on budget preparation and execution, budget transparency, fiscal decentralisation, tax policy and aid and debt management.

We have previously worked in Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda. Our support has covered budget planning and execution, fiscal decentralisation, aid and debt management, and revenue and tax administration. We have also developed expertise in digital public finance reforms and budget transparency.

ODI also carries out research and convening on public finance, allowing the sharing of lessons learned from research with our country partnership programmes, and the documentation of lessons from our country partnership work. Additionally, ODI can also support countries through the ODI Fellowship Scheme, which has matched early career economists with government placements around the world since 1963.

Centre for Tax Analysis in Developing Countries (TaxDev)

TaxDev – supported by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) – provides targeted support, as well as resources and tools, for effective tax policymaking in low- and middle-income countries, underpinned by new research on the impact of taxes in lower income countries. TaxDev has established country partnerships in Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda. Expansion to two new countries is planned during the current phase of the project.

Digital Public Financial Management (PFM)

We understand that IT plays an important role in Public Financial Management reform. IT can be crucial to problem solving and meeting user needs; it is key to the architecture of government data, platforms and services; and it facilitates new models of funding. ODI can put digital reform at the heart of our country partnerships work, building on our innovative research and convening in this area.