Water will soon flow again in Majdel Aanjar. And for that, local residents can thank an innovative new program that harnesses the power of the sun. The small farming community in northeastern Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley — equidistant from Beirut and Damascus, the respective capitals of Lebanon and Syria — has suffered from a severe water…
From reversing deforestation to phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, COP26’s commitments unlocked new pathways for the development community to spur climate action. However, the success of these financial and policy commitments depends on climate-vulnerable countries’ ability to attract and deploy climate finance effectively. Underdeveloped fund management systems and limited financial expertise are common roadblocks…
USAID is putting self-reliance at the core of its strategy to help countries achieve and finance their own development objectives and thereby end their need for foreign assistance. To finance self-reliance, countries will need systems that mobilize and spend public resources efficiently, enabling environments that allow the private sector to thrive, and diverse and well-regulated…
Recognized as the starting point of the Arab Spring movement, Tunisia’s 2011 revolution spurred unprecedented political and social transformation. This report highlights how USAID’s Fiscal Reform for a Strong Tunisia (FIRST) activity provided technical assistance and capacity building to the Tunisian Ministry of Finance, so that its fiscal institutions were positioned for sustainable growth following…
The Kosovo Partnerships for Development (KPD) project’s final report covers how it implemented its scope of work by completing significant reform-driven initiatives. These objectives were to improve the business environment and the implementation of construction reforms, and to enhance the country’s macroeconomic stability and public financial management (PFM) at the central and local level. Despite…
Critical to expanding and diversifying the foundation of municipal financing is meaningful, strategic engagement of the private sector. This piece offers recommendations and possible solutions to municipal officials seeking creative ways to leverage existing resources and access new ones.
In May, Chemonics, the Urban Institute, and USAID co-hosted a panel discussion and interactive breakout sessions to explore approaches for fostering commitment to more transparent, sustainable financial governance. This summit highlighted experiences and lessons from three USAID projects — including the Chemonics-implemented Fiscal Reform for a Strong Tunisia (FIRST) project — that have successfully built…
The FIRST project has used a variety of tools to improve citizens’ trust in the Ministry of Finance. FIRST created a comic book with a superhero character named Tunman to raise schoolchildren’s awareness of why the government needs to raise taxes to pay for public services and why it is a civic duty of citizens to…
Zoltan Milic is an experienced economist with over 17 years of experience in monitoring and evaluation, data and complex systems modeling and analyses, change management, and internal auditing. Zoltan is currently the director of Monitoring and Evaluation, for Chemonics’ US Government Business Line. In his prior role, he served as the monitoring and impact evaluation…
Because of IFMS support, Haitian government agencies had real-time access to expenditure data through the improved IFMS network. Entities can send and receive key data faster and make more informed planning decisions. IFMS installed the UXP, a technology developed in Estonia that enables peer-to-peer data exchange over encrypted and mutually authenticated channels. IFMS contributed to…