Context
In the Agenda 2063, the 55 Member States of the African Union formulate a vision of an "integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens." The AU Commission (AUC) takes on a coordinating role in this pan-African reform effort. It bundles executive and administrative functions, in particular managing the AU budget.
In 2016, the AU member states adopted a comprehensive reform to build an effective management capacity, adjusting the role and mandate of numerous AU Organs and Institutions, including the AUC. To strengthen the AUC's ownership in this regard, part of the donor community is pooling its contributions in a Joint Financial Arrangement (JFA). This provides the AUC with increased planning certainty, but also requires streamlined and more uniform reporting and auditing.
Institutional capacity building is considered a fundamental cross-cutting issue within the AUC and, in this respect, has positive effects on the performance of other departments.
Objective
The AUC departments involved in the JFA are enabled to organise planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation more impact-oriented, forward-looking and gender-sensitive.
Approach
The project focuses on fostering operational efficiency, effectiveness and transparency in the following two areas of action:
The project supports the optimisation of process management, taking into account mandatory quality criteria such as impact orientation, multi-annuality and gender sensitivity. Planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation procedures are coordinated, responsibilities are clearly defined and cooperation between departments is established.
Through broad-based professional training and individual support services, employees are capacitated to take the above-mentioned quality criteria into account. For example, the project supports the offer of virtual courses, the establishment of help desks and the training of multipliers.
Gender equality will be established as a standard criterion in the process management of the AUC, taking into account the AU gender strategy. This is to ensure that the different needs of the genders are taken into account at an early stage. In addition, more women are to benefit proportionately from the training measures offered.