“Could the Palestinian Authority survive?” That was the question on many Palestinians’ minds when Salam Fayyad became finance minister in June 2002 and the cash-strapped government was struggling to pay its civil servants and suppliers. To avert a collapse, Fayyad quickly took steps to increase government revenue. He developed a system that would direct into a single, centralized treasury account all taxes, fees, and other income collected by government offices. He created a fund that consolidated the Palestinian Authority’s tangled and largely opaque commercial and investment assets and contracted with an outside firm to conduct a full audit of those holdings. He also took action to reduce smuggling and assert control over the tobacco authority and petroleum commission—two autonomous PA agencies plagued with management problems. The reforms required Fayyad to navigate political resistance and an entrenched administrative culture wary of financial transparency. Fayyad’s achievements enhanced efficiency, helped restart the flow of tax revenues withheld by Israel, and enabled the PA to attract external support and investment, quashing—at least temporarily—an existential financial crisis.

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on a series of interviews conducted with Salam Fayyad in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2019. The study also incorporates other interviews conducted in the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published March 2022.

When Salam Fayyad became finance minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in June 2002, the government was struggling to manage expenditures effectively and to deliver the budget to the legislative council on time. Success in addressing those problems required winning acceptance from President Yasser Arafat and other top officials for new work processes, securing other ministries’ compliance with changes in operations, and instituting radical new levels of transparency. Fayyad focused on fixing the system instead of investigating past malfeasance. Under his watch, the finance ministry began engaging with the council’s budget and finance committee, instituting monthly financial reporting, introducing reliable internal control and audit procedures, and adopting internationally recognized transparency measures. Those reforms enhanced the credibility of the authority’s financial management internationally, restarted the flow of external aid and PA revenues withheld by Israel, and helped temporarily end a financial crisis.

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and on a series of conversations with Salam Fayyad in Princeton, New Jersey, the same year. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published March 2022.

When Salam Fayyad became the Palestinian Authority’s finance minister in June 2002, one of his biggest challenges was to improve financial management in the security sector. To pay police, emergency workers, and other security personnel, commanders handed out cash to subordinates—a practice that was demeaning and that created opportunities for corruption. Procurement of equipment and supplies was neither open nor competitive and took place outside scrutiny by the finance ministry, which had little or no way of knowing where the government’s money ended up. To address the problems, Fayyad, a political outsider, had to take on a deep-rooted culture of secrecy, the reluctance of a powerful president, and resistance from some of the security officials. He began to tighten controls by working with a reform-minded legislature to incorporate procedural changes into the 2003 budget law. He then identified security service chiefs who were open to payroll reform, and he helped them become early adopters. After more than a year of private persuasion, backed by growing public discontent with corruption, Fayyad was able to implement reforms that reduced opportunities to divert funds and that increased security workers’ take-home pay. He also put security forces’ procurement activities under finance ministry oversight, thereby further limiting the risk of corruption.

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in the cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho in June and July 2019 and on a series of conversations with Salam Fayyad in Princeton, New Jersey, the same year. The case is part of a series on state building in Palestine, 2002–05 and 2007–11. Case published March 2022.

In 2003, after 14 years of civil war and as many failed treaties, representatives of Liberia’s government, rebel groups, and civil society came together in Accra, Ghana, to negotiate a peace agreement. They chose Gyude Bryant, a businessman unaffiliated with any of the factions, to head a transitional government made up of ministers from the incumbent political party, the two main rebel groups, and independents, including opposition politicians and civil society leaders. Bryant’s primary goals were to maintain peace and pave the way for elections by the end of 2005—an assignment that entailed disarming and demobilizing more than 100,000 combatants, creating the means to deal with crucial issues ranging from truth and reconciliation to governance reform, and addressing a long list of other tasks—all of it under the scrutiny of Liberia’s legislature as well as regional and international organizations. Although successful democratic elections in late 2005 marked the achievement of Bryant’s primary aims, his fractious government failed to reach many other objectives, including building capacity and ensuring that resources earmarked for development served their intended purposes. The difficulties led to a novel, temporary system of governance—shared with international partners—that targeted procurement, spending, and other aspects of financial management. This case offers insights useful for planning transitions in low-income, divided societies where prolonged conflict has gutted institutional capacity.

Tyler McBrien drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Monrovia, Liberia in November 2019. Case published in January 2020.

This series highlights the governance challenges inherent in power sharing arrangements, profiles adaptations that eased those challenges, and offers ideas about adaptations. 

The United States Institute of Peace funded the development of this case study.

After a decade of reforms to boost tax collection, in 2014 the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) faced up to one of its biggest remaining challenges. Although the agency had significantly improved its internal capacity—along with its ability to collect taxes from registered taxpayers—large numbers of Ugandans paid nothing because they were unregistered or because inadequate compliance monitoring enabled them to underpay. The holes in the system undermined public trust and bedeviled the URA’s efforts to meet the government-mandated target to raise tax revenue to 16% of gross domestic product. The URA then joined other government agencies to bring millions of unregistered citizens into the tax net, and it tightened the oversight of existing taxpayers who were paying less than their fair share. Prime targets were millions of Ugandans who worked in the informal economy, which the government said accounted for nearly half of the country’s economic activity. At the same time, the URA set up operations to go after wealthy and politically connected individuals who avoided paying their full tax load, and it created a separate unit to press government departments that failed to remit to the URA the taxes they collected, such as withholdings from employees. The URA’s program achieved strong gains on all three fronts and thereby helped increase the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio to 14.2% in the 2017–18 fiscal year from 11.3% in 2013–14. Just as important, the program made significant progress toward a fairer distribution of the tax burden for Ugandans across all economic levels.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in January and February 2019. Case published April 2019.

To view a short version of the case, please click here 

See related Uganda Revenue Case Study: Righting the Ship: Uganda Overhauls its Tax Agency, 2004-2014

In the early 2000s, the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) faced a crisis. Even after adopting a modernized legal framework that made the agency semiautonomous—able to operate much as a business would, though still accountable to a public board—the institution remained paralyzed by corruption, outdated technologies and procedures, and a toxic organizational culture. In 2004, to begin righting the ship, the URA’s board appointed 43-year-old Allen Kagina, who had served the agency for more than a decade, as the new commissioner general. Kagina engineered a radical overhaul that required all 2,000 URA staff members to reapply for new positions under a revamped organizational structure. A new modernization office overhauled tax procedures, upgraded the URA’s technology, improved anticorruption measures, strengthened the tax investigation and prosecution function, and enhanced staff capacity. At the same time, the URA was working to smooth its customs procedures and improve cooperation with partner countries in the East African Community. 

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in January and February 2019. Case published April 2019.

To view a short version of the case, please click here

See related Uganda Revenue Authority Case Study: Bolstering Revenue, Building Fairness: Uganda Extends its Tax Reach, 2014-2018

In 2012, Colombia’s public health system was headed for bankruptcy. The country had made significant progress on important public health priorities: expanding immunizations, reducing infant mortality, and attaining near-universal insurance coverage. But a Constitutional Court ruling that the government had to pay for almost all health services and technologies for those it subsidized, combined with rising pharmaceutical prices, was pushing the budget into deficit. Economist Alejandro Gaviria became minister of health and social protection amid that simmering crisis. To contain spiraling costs while enabling the sector to focus on some of its priorities, he worked to create new legislation that would limit the services the government would cover, regulate the drug market, and adjust an incentive structure that had lowered accountability and encouraged excess. In parallel, budget officials in the health ministry, the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, and the National Planning Department tried to improve financial management of the system in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs. In the end, some of Gaviria’s efforts paid off and the ministry averted immediate insolvency, but as of 2018, the viability of Colombia’s health-care system remained in doubt even as health indicators improved.

Gordon LaForge drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Bogota, Colombia in September 2018. Case published November 2018.

To view a short version of the case, please click here

When he won Indonesia’s October 2004 presidential election, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono found he had inherited a struggling land administration system that would block progress on some of his key policy initiatives. The National Land Agency (known by the abbreviation BPN, for Badan Pertanahan Nasional) managed records on landownership and transactions. But the organization was dogged by corruption, high costs, and delays. On average, it took 33 days, six visits to a local land office, and US$110 for landowners to register property transactions. In addition, the BPN held ownership records for only a third of the estimated 89 million land parcels on the thousands of islands in the sprawling archipelago. In keeping with his campaign pledge to spur rural development, Yudhoyono appointed a new leadership team to revamp the BPN and get the agency on track. The team partnered with the World Bank in a program to title unregistered land and then rolled out a new land database that digitally stored all new transactions, equipped vehicles to deliver mobile services in rural areas, and worked with other ministries to design a comprehensive OneMap for the country. Although the reforms improved efficiency and sharply increased the pace of property registration, 10 years after Yudhoyono’s election it remained clear that additional measures were still needed to reach the goal of a well-functioning, corruption-free, comprehensive, and sustainable land registry.

Leon Schreiber and Jordan Schneider drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, in March and April 2015 as well as in October and November 2017. Case published December 2017. 

When he took office as South Africa’s finance minister in 2009, Pravin Gordhan found that government officials responsible for purchasing goods and services were wasting billions of dollars every year as a result of inefficiency, errors, and corruption. Gordhan wanted to confront all three problems by consolidating and strengthening control over procurement. In February 2013, he tapped longtime finance ministry official Kenneth Brown to serve as the country’s first chief procurement officer. Brown had to restructure systems, tighten procedures and regulations, and build effective oversight. He assembled a skilled team and persuaded skeptical politicians and business interests to support Gordhan’s goals. His office reviewed and renegotiated costly contracts, provided crucial market analysis and advice on procurement strategies for other departments, and took first steps toward creating an online system. Brown strengthened funding, built a staff, and put new systems in place. By the time he retired in December 2016, his efforts had sharply reduced opportunities for corruption, increased transparency in the procurement process, and slashed the time required to process tenders. The new office helped South Africa better comply with some of its obligations under the United Nations Convention against Corruption, even though Brown and Gordhan faced opposition from people at some of the highest levels of government.

Tristan Dreisbach drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town, South Africa, in March 2017. The British Academy-Department for International Development AntiCorruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published June 2017.

In April 2006, six international donor agencies established a program to help Mozambique’s government register community land rights and improve tenure security for rural residents. Under Mozambique’s constitution, the state owned all land. A 1997 law, adopted after a 15-year civil war, sought to recognize rural communities’ customary tenure rights while encouraging commercial investment through the issuance of 50-year leaseholds. But many communities failed to register their holdings with the central government, leaving their rights vulnerable to powerful state and corporate interests. To address the problem, the donor group established the Community Land Initiative (iniciativa para Terras Comunitárias, or iTC), a program to register community parcels in the government cadastre and empower communities to negotiate with potential investors. The iTC coordinated with national and local governments as well as nongovernmental organizations to map the borders of community lands. The program informed community members about their land rights and how to use and protect them. It also established natural resource committees, which enabled communities to receive shares of the natural resource taxes paid by commercial investors working on communal lands. The iTC further created producer associations to support budding commercial farmers, resolved boundary disputes, and worked with provincial cadastral offices to issue certificates that specified property boundaries. By mid 2016, the program had registered 655 communities in the government cadastre—nearly four times the estimated 171 community registrations carried out before the iTC was established. The registrations covered 6.9 million hectares and 10% of the country’s rural population.

Leon Schreiber drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Maputo and Xai-Xai, Mozambique, in November 2016. The British Academy-Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Program funded the development of this case study. Case published February 2017.  

A 2017 workshop, Driving Change, Securing Tenure, profiled recent initiatives to strengthen tenure security and reform land registration systems in seven countries: South Africa, Canada, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Mozambique, Australia and Tanzania.

Watch the video of Emidio de Oliveira - Director, iniciativa para Terras Comunitárias.