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<div class="dr-kicker">Practitioner Essay</div>
<h1 class="dr-title">Building PFM Capacity from the Ground Up: Liberia's Financial Management Training School and the Africa Region Award for Excellence</h1>
<p class="dr-deck">Establishing financial management capacity in Liberia's post-war civil service required working against the grain of the World Bank's procurement rules, its training designs, and its theory of how capacity develops. A first-person account of what was built — and why it worked where conventional technical assistance does not.</p>
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<span class="dr-author">Parminder Brar</span>
<span class="dr-sep">·</span>
<span class="dr-date">December 2024</span>
<span class="dr-sep">·</span>
<span class="dr-readtime">34 min read</span>
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<p class="abstract">This is the second in a series of practitioner essays on PFM reform in Liberia, 2003–2008. The Financial Management Training School received the World Bank's Africa Region Award for Excellence in 2007.</p>
<h2>I. The University of Liberia Accounting Lecture</h2>
<p>The idea for the Financial Management Training School came from an accounting lecture at the University of Liberia. I was visiting the campus in early 2004, trying to understand the human capital base that the post-conflict reconstruction effort had to work with. I walked into an accounting class that was supposed to have thirty students. There were eighty people in a room designed for fifty, and another sixty standing in the corridor looking through the windows.</p>
<p>The lecturer, a quietly formidable man named Dr. Samuel Conteh, was teaching double-entry bookkeeping to people who were desperate to learn it. The students were not eighteen-year-olds. Most of them were adults — civil servants who had survived the war and were trying to rebuild skills that had atrophied or that they had never been able to develop. The hunger in that room was unmistakable. What was equally unmistakable was that the University of Liberia's accounting department, with whatever resources it had, could not feed it at the scale it required.</p>
<h2>II. The CIPFA Option and Why It Was Rejected</h2>
<p>The conventional approach to this problem would have been to contract the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy to deliver a training programme. CIPFA is the leading UK professional body for public sector accountants. It has delivered training in post-conflict settings before and has a legitimate track record.</p>
<p>The problem with CIPFA in the Liberia context was structural. A CIPFA qualification is internationally portable. A Liberian civil servant who completes a CIPFA programme has a credential that is recognised in the UK, across the Commonwealth, and in the donor community. This is exactly the kind of qualification that civil servants who have survived fourteen years of war and want options will use to leave the civil service. The training investment would walk out of the Ministry of Finance with its certificate and get on a plane. I had seen this happen in other post-conflict contexts. The incentive structure was wrong for Liberia's specific situation.</p>
<h2>III. The Five-Partner Architecture</h2>
<p>The model we designed was different. The Financial Management Training School was a joint programme involving five institutions: the University of Liberia, the Association of Accountancy Bodies in West Africa, the College of Accountancy, the Liberia Institute of Public Administration, and the World Bank. Each had a specific role. The University provided space and academic credentialing. ABWA provided professional accreditation that was West African rather than global — portable within the region, but not a passport out of it. The College of Accountancy provided the technical curriculum. LIPA provided the public sector context and the administrative support. The World Bank provided the funding — a $450,000 LICUS grant — and the design oversight.</p>
<p>The design logic was simple: train people to a standard that makes them valuable in Liberia's civil service and in the broader West African professional market, but not a standard that makes them immediately hireable in London or Washington. Keep the investment in Liberia.</p>
<h2>IV. Building the School</h2>
<p>SM Kumar and Amitabh Tripathi managed the day-to-day construction of the programme. Kumar had experience in post-conflict capacity building across multiple African contexts; Tripathi brought financial management systems expertise. The Ministry of Finance provided ten rooms in an annex of the building that had survived the war in usable condition. Students were paid at civil service rates for the duration of the programme — not a stipend, but actual salary continuation — so that the training did not require them to choose between learning and eating.</p>
<p>The curriculum was two years: financial accounting, government accounting standards, budget preparation and execution, internal audit, procurement, and IT skills. The IT component was taught by Barbry Keller, whose Book Project brought donated computers and provided the hardware the school needed. The computers were the most expensive single input. Without Keller's intervention, the IT curriculum would have been theoretical.</p>
<h2>V. The Graduation and What Followed</h2>
<p>The first cohort of thirty-two students graduated in July 2009 at City Hall in Monrovia, in a ceremony attended by the Minister of Finance and senior government officials. The graduates gave brief speeches. Augustus Zayzay said: "Now we have the tools to make the maximum impact, to contribute to improving our country's FM system." Patience Nagbe said: "This has given me the confidence to do my job." Doliakeh Quoimie was thinking about the next step: "Now we have knowledge at the local level, but it would be good to build on that with international exposure and training."</p>
<p>The school received the World Bank's Africa Region Award for Excellence in 2007 — before the first cohort had graduated, on the basis of the design and the implementation progress to that point. The Award reflected a genuine institutional recognition that the model was doing something different and more sustainable than the conventional technical assistance approach.</p>
<h2>VI. The Long-Term Significance: IFMIS Powered by FM School Graduates</h2>
<p>By 2013, eighty-three graduates had completed the programme and been deployed to key financial management positions across government. The longer-term significance of that cohort became clear with the implementation of the FreeBalance IFMIS system — a world-class Integrated Financial Management Information System selected through competitive procurement. The successful rollout of FreeBalance in Liberia, at a time when similar systems were failing across the region, was powered principally by FM Training School graduates who had spent two years intensively developing the IT skills that the implementation required.</p>
<p>This is the outcome the school was designed to produce, and it is the outcome that conventional technical assistance models systematically fail to achieve. High-cost, short-term, stop-gap skills interventions are not sustainable. They leave no lasting institutional trace. The FM Training School worked because it was embedded in Liberian institutions, credentialed by West African professional standards, staffed by people who would remain in Liberia, and designed from the outset to transition into full national ownership.</p>
<p class="citation"><em>Brar, Parminder. "Building PFM Capacity from the Ground Up: Liberia's Financial Management Training School." Development Reality, December 2024. globalnomad.in</em></p>
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<span class="dr-tags-label">Topics:</span>
<span class="dr-tag">Liberia</span> <span class="dr-tag">Fragile States</span> <span class="dr-tag">PFM</span> <span class="dr-tag">World Bank</span> <span class="dr-tag">Public Financial Management</span> <span class="dr-tag">Capacity Development</span>
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