Applying PDIA to PFM in Africa

Salimah Samji Welcome to the Reflecting on a Decade of Building State Capability podcast series. On today’s podcast, we have Joana Bento and Danielle Serebro from CABRI, which stands for Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative. Welcome.

Danielle Serebro Thank you so much.

Joana Bento Thank you. Thank Salimah. Thank you for having us.

Salimah Samji It’s just a real pleasure to have the both of you join us in this podcast today. You know, our journey together began in April 2017, when we helped design the PFM in Africa program that uses PDIA, and we worked together in 2017 as well as 2018, and then we left and left it in your very capable hands to be able to continue running this program. And you have been successfully running this program since then. And what I would really like to hear is how this program is going. And that’s really the basis of this conversation today. So I was wondering if you could just start from where we left off, 2019. Right? We left the end of 2018. And then you started to do this on your own.

Joana Bento Yeah. So I think, you know, CABRI’s history with the PDIA approach has been quite extensive. And although formally we really only started working with the PDIA approach in 2017, 2018, basically since CABRI’s inception, this approach was quite appealing to us as an organization because CABRI is an international organization that was created by African member states and for African member states to support ministries of finance, predominantly to improve PFM systems. And so, because of the way that CABRI was created and its philosophy has always been about providing a space for African member states to have a say in and take ownership of their budget and public finance reforms. And really about understanding that context matters, right? Because we had a group of member countries that was vastly different and which had unique historical and cultural and economic contexts. And so we understood that we needed to develop localized solutions that work for those countries. And so the PDIA principles really aligned with this philosophy and essentially gave CABRI the tools that we needed to apply this philosophy and empower our member countries to take ownership of their reform agendas by focusing on, you know, mobilizing local agency, understanding the context and the political economy constraints and developing localized solutions and really building important capabilities along the way. And so since 2012, actually, we’ve had various engagements between the BSC and CABRI. And then it was, you know, later formalized in 2017 and 2018 when the BSC helped us put together this structured program for our member countries that really allowed us to stay true to our philosophy and also to apply the principles of the PDIA approach. So basically, since 2017, we’ve been working, you know, putting together some statistics earlier, and we’ve basically worked with 42 country teams and currently have eight ongoing teams in two different programs. This was across 23 African countries. And essentially this has covered numerous public finance management areas. So from debt, cash and liquidity management to problems related to public investment management, procurement, fiscal decentralization, as many problems as we had teams basically. And since 2018, we’ve also expanded the areas of work to areas of work that are more at intersection with PFM and other kind of public policy issues. So, for instance, we’ve been working recently with the Swedish Tax Agency on an international capability program focused on voluntary tax compliance. So here we bring together the tax officials and the ministries of finance to tackle tax policy or tax administration issues. And then recently we’ve had the building public finance capabilities for improved social services for children in partnership with Unicef that Danielle was leading on. So essentially, the PDIA approach has been a core part of our work, of CABRI’s work, after 2018 and our flagship program that we run basically every year, and we’ve kind of spinned off to different areas of work in partnership with other organizations. Danielle, not sure if you want to add anything here.

Danielle Serebro I mean, we’ve obviously refined the program quite a bit over the years. We now have a 12 month program rather than an eight month program, and that comes off the back of an evaluation that was done and reflected on an earlier podcast by Andrew Lawson. We’ve also, as Joana said, we’ve extended the program beyond just the Ministry of Finance, and that’s, for me, been a very successful extension of this work, because a long standing criticism of PFM is that the Ministry of Finance is the custodian of public finances, often neglects to include the perspective of line ministries and any reform that the Ministry of Finance does should improve service delivery, should improve equity objectives. So we essentially brought together ministries of finance and line ministries on equal footing in these teams. So in Ministries of Health, Ministry of Education, together with the Ministry of Finance, to actually resolve problems at the intersection of public finance and service delivery.

Salimah Samji That’s really, you know, what we really love to hear is how things iterate, right? We we’re always constantly learning first right and then iterating as we go. I really like this new space of yours of looking at PFM. There’s just so much siloing in government that people aren’t necessarily talking to each other. So I was wondering if you could share more about what that’s been like, whether it’s with the Swedish tax example you gave or the social services for children, just to be able to give our listeners a real sense of what does that look like? You know, the training for PFM is just people who are in the Ministry of Finance, and it’s just them who are working on PDIA teams. When you bring in other line ministries, what does that look like?

Danielle Serebro So I mean, we’ve always tried to incorporate the line ministry perspective, but it was often more peripheral. So, you know, they would go and consult with the line ministry. And occasionally we had a single member from another ministry within the team. But the focus has always been on the Ministry of Finance. So what we have tried to do more intentionally is have equal representation. We bring them on equal footing. So, for example, there was a team in Malawi who was looking at inequitable and insufficient financial resources and limited autonomy of health facilities. And obviously, you can see that this largest intersection of the Ministry of Finance, how you get funds down to the facility level and whether they will allow that and, you know, the fiduciary risk that is involved there. But also, of course, the Ministry of Health has a huge say in a health financing reform. So they need to both be co-creating and co-leading. And that doesn’t happen. If you see a health financing reform, it’s either the Ministry of Finance is completely excluded. And so we had a team from Somalia looking at execution of health and education programs. So obviously you can see that this needs to include the perspective of Ministry of Finance. And Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education.

Joana Bento In the voluntary tax compliance program, there was also a very similar effort to bring together the tax administrations and the Ministries of Finance to work together on very specific tax policy and administration issues that, you know, you would think that these two institutions would work together quite tightly, but in actual fact, you know, it almost feels like the Ministry of Finance is almost there to set targets for the administration without understanding necessarily what their constraints are in terms of raising these revenues and administering the whole system and process of collecting taxes. And similarly, you know, the administration doesn’t necessarily have the view of what it takes to set up these tax policies in the way that is, you know, thinks about equitable issues in a way that thinks about justice issues. So it was interesting to bring these two perspectives together and to have these two perspectives work on these problems together.

Salimah Samji Can you share anything that you’ve learned from this? Is it something that you want to do more of and you might not actually see impact yet, but things that you’ve learned from this working on PFM plus.

Danielle Serebro I mean, one thing that was obvious to me is how little understanding the line ministries have of financial management and how interested they are in learning, capacitating themselves, and that this was really good opportunity for that. But at the same time, how little the Ministry of Finance understands what happens on the ground and what they are actually feeding into, which is this broader development goals of government. So I think taking the Minister of Finance out of their like slight ivory tower and getting them to focus on what is really happening on the ground is also very motivating for them, because they can actually see that PFM is a means to an end. I mean that is how it should be seen. But I think often that ends is so separate from the Ministry of Finance that they can lose sight of it. So this program, I think, straddled that quite nicely by building the capacities, the PFM capacities of line ministries, but also reminding the Ministry of Finance of what they’re actually working towards.

Joana Bento So I think what I’ve taken from this, I mean, not just from the program, but it’s that there is a lot of inherent knowledge within institutions, even within the same institution, in the same department, that isn’t coming to the fore because people aren’t talking to one another. That was, I think, the key lesson that I took just from, you know, having this program with ministries of finance. And then that just blossomed even further when we incorporated then the sector ministries and the tax agencies in a more equal footing. And that’s I think what we wanted to harness was these sorts of capabilities and that knowledge and to empower these officials to come up with, you know, their own solutions to their own problems in a way that is consultative in a way that is participatory in a way that really considers the perspectives of different officials. And I think in that way that is more legitimate as well.

Salimah Samji Yeah. You know, we often say know-how sits and brains and that tacit knowledge, there is a lot of it there. But how do you actually get it out so that people can share it and it can become much bigger and better? You said earlier that you’ve worked with 42 teams in 23 African countries. That is quite incredible. You should be really proud of yourselves for the reach that you have. Are there any success stories that you can share with our listeners on what some of these teams and I imagine it’s more teams than countries. So you’ve worked with many teams in some countries. Are there some stories of success that you can share?

Joana Bento Yes. And I think it was also important for us to define what success is, because obviously there’s the one part of it which is success in supporting teams to solve very important public finance problems. And we’ve seen that this approach can facilitate that. And even in a very short period of time, we’ve seen that. But then there’s success in terms of empowering and building the capabilities within teams to tackle problems and other problems that they have within institutions, and instilling a very different way of working that public officials and institutions were not perhaps used to. And that’s something that participants always tell us at the end of the program. We haven’t solved our entire problem. Oftentimes it’s too complex to solve within a 12 month period. But we’ve also learned about a new way of working that is not traditional. You know, this is not a traditional training. This is not something we’re used to. This is not the routine kind of work that we’re so accustomed to. This was really about stepping outside the usual roles and responsibilities that officials are used to, many ministries of finance and sector ministries, to tackle very real problems. Right. And for us, success is also about that and instilling that different way of doing things and different way of approaching reforms and really building skills within the team. So things like critical thinking and analytical skills to better be able to understand what’s working in our context and what isn’t working and using evidence for that. Skills to understand the context and the space for change, skills to better be able to communicate like the problems that we have and the storytelling around those problems, these kinds of skills I think equally important as solving the problem, because it’s what build capabilities in the long run and strengthens governance systems in the countries. Now, obviously, we’ve also seen real success in terms of solving these problems. So I think perhaps 1 or 2 that stand out for me is in the Central African Republic. So back in 2018, we worked with a team on the problem related to low execution of investment projects that were financed from state resources. And this was obviously in a post-conflict context, which obviously presents additional challenges. So but basically in some sectors they had an execution level of 0%, like sometimes, okay, 2%. But through the program, the team worked on various issues just to improve planning processes for investment projects, particularly in ensuring that there were more quality feasibility studies that were considered at the project appraisal stage. They also worked on various issues in budget execution, particularly on procurement and improving the timeliness of the procurement processes by establishing also better coordination mechanisms between the procurement agency, the MDAs and so on. And we saw in subsequent years that the execution of capital projects really improved quite significantly from 42 to 50%. So this is also documented in our practice notes in our leadership stories. If you look at our website or PFM Knowledge Hub, you can have a look. And also in the external evaluation that Fiscus did of the VFC program, and that was also led by Andrew Lawson. Also more recently, we’ve seen good progress on the various teams that we worked with in our voluntary tax compliance program. So for instance, in Kenya, you know, Kenya has managed to make really good and significant improvements to reduce the amount of tax debts that was owed to the KRA. And it was such an important problem and a big problem. In 2022, they had estimated that the total tax debt represented about 75% of their yearly tax revenue. So it was a very important problem for them. And since then, we’ve been working with them as well to support them on various fronts. Together with the Swedish Tax Agency, on the ICBP program, they worked on various things like providing incentives for taxpayers to settle their debts, and also different initiatives to reduce the gaps in how the data was recorded in their tax information systems. And by early 2024, this year, we saw a significant reduction of about billions of shillings. Through this initiative, we also saw, you know, that the team managed to reconcile information on the tax debt, quite significantly by about 10 billion shillings. So there was quite an extensive and successful initiative as well. But yeah, I think Danielle also has different success stories that stood out for her.

Danielle Serebro Thanks, Joana. Yeah. So I mean, I think I would first echo in terms of what you said about institution building and diffusing the PDIA approach across government, and that that for us is a huge measure of success. We all know the PDIA approach is fairly intuitive, but a lot of the countries that we work with haven’t had the space to develop and reform in that way. So where I live, South Africa, the National Treasury who is a huge proponent of PDIA and the BPSC program at CABRI. This is how they have often approached reforms. It’s been a problem driven process initiative, adaptive. But a lot of our member countries, because they’ve been so heavily donor dependent, haven’t had that space to actually carve out their own path and turn away slightly from best practice and just doing what they need to do to build legitimacy with their partners. So I really believe CABRI has done successfully is create a space for the PDIA approach to start infiltrating throughout government. And one way that we’ve seen that done is a diffusion program that we ran in Lesotho. So a team that I actually coached in 2018, a team of six Ministry of Finance officials, all female, because that is how the Ministry of Finance in Lesotho party does think they were working on a problem around the Ministry of Finance, not knowing how much cash ministries, departments and agencies need or when they require it. The team did make quite a lot of progress in what was then an eight month program. So close many idle bank accounts and strengthen procurement planning, improve cash flow forecasting. But they got to a point where they acknowledge that further progress would require closer involvement and acceptance of other stakeholders that was within the Ministry of Finance and across the line ministries and procurement authority, actually. So what we did is after the team, the original team, the 2018 team, completed the program, they were called the Spice Girls, we supported them on a diffusion program. So Joana and I went into Maseru. We did a coaching of the coaches. This team remained incredibly committed, so we were with them for a week in Maseru, took them through some of the principles that we had learned as coaches, and then they became these six women on the original team became what we regarded as coordinators of a three teams of 18 officials, and that was across different departments in the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Education, water, etc.. And then we took a bit of a backseat once we had done the framing workshop and the coordinators, then really becoming what was sort of like coaches. I say not exactly coaches because they were still playing the game to some extent. They tried to essentially take a bit of a backseat and offer space for reflection, but they were officials. So we took some of the backseat and our relationship maintained with the original coordinators who then coached these teams. I mean, I think progress was probably a bit slower in the second part, the second leg, when we took a bit more of a backseat. But that was absolutely fine for us because what we really wanted to do and what this program was extremely successful in doing was capacitating these original team members with coaching skills. I’d say about three of the team were extremely quiet, introverted, and by the end of the program, they were the most dynamic women I honestly had the privilege of working with. And just the coaching skills were phenomenal. And perhaps more importantly, we saw this approach being institutionalized more broadly throughout the public sector in Lesotho. So that for me, even more than the technical successes, was something that I think is a huge success of this program. So a team that I worked with in Ghana, they essentially were working on delayed releases of funds from the Ministry of Finance to line ministries which they felt compromised the government’s ability to meet its service delivery objectives. Initially, there was quite a lot of reluctance amongst the team to who was with the Ministry of Finance to actually acknowledge the Ministry of Finance’s role in these delays. There was a lot of, you know, sort of finger pointing around that the problem lay more with Line Ministries, who were part of the problem and submitting unrealistic cash plans, failing to submit proper documentation when requesting their budget allotments. But this team was open minded, and they consulted extensively with in the Ministry of Finance and with Line Ministries to figure out where the bottlenecks were. And eventually they did recognize that a lot of the bottlenecks were at the Ministry of Finance level, and probably the primary one was that the budget director was required to approve every individual spending request, and this is just one person. So the team did make a recommendation that responsibility for these approvals be devolved to section heads. And, you know, they even gave under a certain threshold this could be done, but they didn’t get acceptance authorization for that recommendation. So they subsequently looked for ways to ensure that the director budgets could be a more streamlined process and view the status of budget releases without having to rely on manual updates from every schedule officer. So they developed a budget implementation and monitoring tracking tool, which was essentially an app that she could access from the office or remotely to view the status of different requests. And that really reduced these delays in the release of funds. And she was no longer a bottleneck in this way. So really a homegrown technical solution that responded to a functional impediment. And that’s something that we are actually trying to emphasize in another program of ours that focuses on digital public financial management that we’re essentially launching now, and looking at home grown solutions and what can improve the functionality of digital solutions, rather than them just being layered on top of really inefficient processes.

Salimah Samji Local solutions for local problems. I love it. I can’t tell you what a joy it is to just do this podcast with you, and to just hear about all of the incredible things that you’re doing. It’s clear that you have an impact on actual outcomes. And like us, you also care more about building capabilities because that’s really first and foremost what is most important in what we do. How do you measure success in terms of diffusing the PDIA approach or building capability? How do you think about success indicators or metrics?

Joana Bento I think that’s the really good question. And perhaps, you know, one of the reasons why the external evaluation that was done by Fiscus, commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was so critical for us to also understand what it is that we’re going to measure and how are we going to measure it, and that we could measure in our program. And as we say, it’s not just about measuring how teams are solving real problems, but about measuring these capabilities and the different skills that they build throughout the program and the different tools that are given to them throughout the program and how they use those tools, and whether they can then apply those tools to different things. So I think that’s precisely one of the reasons why this evaluation was so critical is that we didn’t just want to measure the technical aspect of the problem solved. And I think so the approach does allow for that because the approach is so reflective, right? At every single step of the way you try to reflect on is this working? Is it not? Is it solving my problem? Is it not? I think that’s the easy part. I think the difficult part is really the measuring of the capabilities. So we always try to assess that during the programs. At the end of the program, we have evaluations and we try to assess the skills that have been built and to what degree, and whether the teams will be able to continue the work going forward and apply these different tools going forward. We’ve also started in 2019, I believe we did a capability assessment, and basically this was also to understand what kind of capabilities do countries need in order to tackle very specific issues and very specific problems. And this was basically to build on the BPFC program and to measure as well these types of capabilities that are being built through the program. And so in this capabilities assessment, the idea wasn’t just to figure out, okay, what kind of coordinated and organizational capabilities do countries need, but also to understand their individual capabilities. So things like motivation, competencies, resources that are needed for individuals to do their job and to perform their duties. So that’s also a compliment that we’re trying to bring to the BPFC programs. To understand this dimension of capabilities and how we measure it. And you can also look our website for the capabilities assessments, which we did, I think for in CAR, Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana. And this is again another component of this.

Danielle Serebro So I mean, I think this has been saying that we know that we need to focus on quite a lot more. Also the iterative, adaptive nature of the program emphasizes a move away from narrowly predetermined linear measures of success, and we really are more interested in experimenting and learning improving functionality than just nice looking solutions. But we do obviously need to have an idea of what will be different when the teams entry points are solved and addressed. And what we have started doing is asking teams quite early in the program, once they’ve identified the entry points, to start saying what they believe success can look like. So this is not saying that CABRI would ever do. It’s you know, it’s very much each the teams say, what are some of the measures of progress or success that they want to track. So for example, the team from Malawi, in our collaboration with Unicef, said that the entry point was that the district health offices don’t keep records of in-kind transfers to health facilities, and some of the measures of progress and success were the 35% of these digital health offices will have a functioning system for recording transfers to facilities. Drug and medical supply counts will be reduced. Information will be routinely shared between the Ministry of Health and the facilities. So it’s really about them judging their own success by figuring out if ideas were actually generated and tried out, if what they were setting out to do actually yielded the success that they saw. So very much up for each of the teams to actually measure their own success.

Salimah Samji I think that nuanced understanding of what success means and to whom is really, really important, because success might look different from the country perspective and from your perspective, from a donors perspective, etc. and I really appreciate that. We’ve talked about success. What are some of the challenges that you have faced? You know, we often say PDIA is hard but worthwhile, but we do say it is hard. So I was wondering if you could share some of the challenges that you have faced.

Joana Bento Yeah. I mean, to react your point. I don’t think PDIA is hard. I think the principles are, you know, quite easy to understand. And the tools are also quite easy to understand, but it’s just how you apply it and how you stay true to the principles that I think is really the hardest part. It’s the applying of it that really is difficult. And I think throughout the different programs that we’ve run, we’ve learned a lot of new things. We’ve come up with different challenges, and we’ve also tried to refine the program to respond to these challenges. So constantly PDIAing and the PDIA approach, or at least the way we apply it. I think one not necessarily challenge, but one thing we are really considering a lot more is this concept of authorization and the role of the authorizer. I think there’s a bit of a point of contention that happens throughout the program, between getting your high level political authorization whilst also getting, you know, local ownership for the reform. So, for instance, in the BPFC programs, and I think in all of the programs that we run, the first process is to get a high level political authorizer to commit to a problem and just say, this is the problem that I want to tackle, and this is the team that I think should tackle the problem. Then, through the process, we also want to make sure that the team then takes ownership of this problem. And there is a sort of refinement that happens through this process, especially then at the framing workshop when the teams kind of come together to start applying the PDIA approach and then they realize, oh, maybe this is not necessarily the problem that we have. Maybe this is perhaps a bias solution that we had in mind. And maybe the problem this and that. So the problem may change a little bit and evolve a little bit as the team takes ownership of it. And then you always have to bring it back to the authorizer, because ultimately this is the person that is going to enable the team to do the work. And I mean, we haven’t necessarily had a lot of resistance from like Authorizers in terms of the problems that the teams themselves have refined or redefined. But, you know, we realize that this is kind of an ongoing process. We can’t just be at the problem formulation stage. It’s really, really constant. And once the problem is reformulated, you have to go back to your authorizer once. Then you start unpacking the problem and new learnings emerge. You have to continue this authorization engagement. Once you come up with ideas. I mean, it’s really, really a constant in the process. So we’ve been paying very close attention to this role of authorizer, because yes, you can play very much a catalytic role in the process. Right? It’s not just to sign off on a piece of paper. They can really be the ones that give the teams the space and the time to do the work. And, you know, they can even take a more managerial or even coaching role for the team, which is often great. And they’re the ones who can even push the teams to take risks. And they can also, you know, call their peers and facilitate the engagements with people outside of their departments because they’re more senior. So we try to make sure that the engagements with the Authorizers and the teams are quite strong early on in the process of really getting off quite early on, and to have the Authorizers work more closely now, I think what this means may be different for different teams. And this is, I think, what we’re also trying to maybe formalize a little bit more. So making sure that the team meets with the authorizer very frequently, make sure that during the various in-country visits that when we go and visit the countries that we meet with these authorizers, that they attend as well different review workshops that we now have throughout the program. So we also have now a mid-term review where the Authorizers attend. Also in the ICBP program on voluntary tax compliance, there was an Authorizers workshop two years into the program, where we brought all the Authorizers together to present the PDIA approach and to flesh out a little bit more the problems that they were prioritizing, but to be something a bit more tangible that could be taken forward then by the teams. And I think going forward, we’re also going to be paying a bit more attention about the potential leadership qualities you would want from these authorizers and how we enable that as well. So I think that for me is the one that stands out. I don’t know for you, Danielle.

Danielle Serebro I think probably my biggest frustration or I guess challenge with teams is often getting them to think a little bit more creatively about the ideas, the solutions they want to introduce, and I guess more freely crawl the design space. I mean, we do obviously introduce them to ideas around positive deviance and latent practice and try to stimulate different ways of thinking that don’t just rely on best practices. But I mean, people are a little bit scared to try new things. And I think that ability to think critically and then creatively and come up with new and innovative ideas is so foreign to most people in the public sectors that we work with that that is really the most prominent challenge. It is often more in the beginning and it shows the value of a good coach, because they can often play a role in encouraging some risk taking and reminding the team, firstly, that the status quo has not yielded the type of results that they want, and that also working in these short, iterative bursts means that the cost of doing things slightly differently and potentially going wrong is likely quite negligible. But, and I think Joana’s emphasis on the authorizer is also important here, having an authorizer that understands the importance of doing things differently and taking some risk reflecting in very short bursts also allows the team the space to come up with new ideas. Another challenge that I’ve seen that impedes some of the team’s work is when there is a very heavy donor presence and technical assistance program on the ground. Unfortunately, that often means that the team doesn’t necessarily take on as active a role, and the decisions that they make are often already being done slightly differently and perhaps less effectively via, you know, the technical systems on the ground. So, yeah, I mean, I think those are the two challenges that I’ve observed with teams. And of course, they’re more like time constraints. And that is something that’s just a perpetual problem with all the teams we work with.

Salimah Samji I think time constraints is a perpetual problem for everyone, including all of the teams that we work with. But I think there’s never enough time to do that. On the risk aversion, the public sector tends to be risk averse because of the fear of failure, and it’s not the failure itself, it’s the blame that they are really worried about in this situation and that stops them. But I really do like your observation of sometimes the art or craft of the coach can really help them. And one of the things that we like to do is just have them take smaller steps, and as they start to take small steps that just again, it’s all about coaching. That leads to just allowing them, the teams themselves, the space to be able to innovate. And authorization, you know, Joana is a really big challenge. We like to think about authorization as a variable or the weather, it keeps changing. We were just talking about earlier how your weather has changed drastically from day to day. Authorization is like that, and that’s why you need to work with it to build and to maintain it, to be able to have those touch points with the authorizer. Because just because they signed the paper doesn’t mean they remember tomorrow that they care about this. And so bringing them back into the conversation, keeping them involved in this, to give the space to the teams to try different things is really, really crucial. And we ourselves have, over time done a lot more check ins with Authorizers and even leadership training for Authorizers. And how do you manage PDIA teams? Because that is a very important element just as much as we do with teams. And how do you build psychological safety in the team? How do you actually build felt accountability within the team? You know, these are things that we work on. We also need to be able to teach that to the authorizers to be able to have that two way street, because if you don’t have that, then it becomes really, really challenging. You know, in this podcast series, we always end with advice. What advice would you give to people who are doing PDIA? So I’ll start with that. Joana, what would you say to our listeners?

Joana Bento What I would say is that there is definitely a lot more capability than you think within your own institutions, and that there is a lot of knowledge that you can harness within your own institutions in order to tackle the problems that you have. So I think that would be the one key thing that I would share with everyone, and specifically with member countries, and especially in the context of in PFM reforms that have often been dominated by international agencies coming in with their expertise and pushing for their own reforms. I think we also need to acknowledge that there is a lot of capabilities in these institutions and that we need to be able to harness that. That would be my one.

Danielle Serebro Yeah, I think for me it’s a measure of patience. You’re not going to see huge change overnight. You are going to see problem solved immediately. And that shouldn’t be a demotivating factor because we know the capabilities are being built. You know, the people are learning new things, that there’s a change in mindset, you know, empowerment of officials, even if you’re not seeing dramatic changes overnight in terms of the outcomes that you want to achieve, you are still building along the way in this process. That’s what PDIA enables.

Salimah Samji Thank you so much both Danielle and Joana for this podcast. I really appreciate all of what you do, and I think the advice that you give is particularly special, because you’ve done this in several countries and worked with several teams, so it’s from true experience. Thank you very much.

Danielle Serebro Thank you so much, Salimah.

Joana Bento Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

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