Exit Phase

September 2020 – June 2022

Executive Summary

The “Strengthening Voice and Accountability” Project (VAP) is a multi-phase intervention in the Kyrgyz Republic supporting citizen participation in local budgetary process and local self-government (LSG) responsiveness to civic initiatives. As its overall goal VAP seeks to ensure that public finances are managed by LSGs in a more transparent and accountable mode through citizen participation in decision-making process.

The Project was delivered in three distinct stages - 2011-2012 (inception phase), 2012-2015 (phase I) and 2015-2020 (phase II, with extension). This Project Document elaborates the proposed Exit Phase activities for the period from September 15, 2020 to March 15, 2022, with intended outcomes aimed at strengthening long-term foundations of sustainability and scale.

Implementation approach:

The implementing strategy for this final phase deprioritizes programmatic activity in the “field”, or direct engagement of LSGs, in favor of effecting changes through institutional intermediaries, in a way that is highly targeted at enabling long-term continuity after the end of project. The main intention of VAP is to provide a lasting contribution towards long-run sustainability and nationwide reach and replication of participatory budgetary process. This will be accomplished while ensuring strong continuity and coherence with the previous phases and building on the achieved results and lessons learned to date. The main level of operation will be at the macro (work with national-level partners) and meso (work with regional universities, regional units of central bodies), with limited micro, or LSG-level activities. There is no specific geographic targeting, unless suggested by the patterns of where the LSGs are showing most “resistance” to participatory budgeting due to a variety of factors.

1. Results and lessons learned

Exit Phase planned results:

The concluding Exit Phase project effort intends to consolidate the achieved outcomes with focus on sustainable, institutionalized capacity building systems for the municipal sector, and further reinforcement of the legal, policy and regulatory environment, prioritizing gender-responsive budgeting. 

By the end of Exit Phase in early 2022 following key results are planned:

• Building on institutional support and capacity of the Union of LSGs, a main non-state partner, VAP will launch the Portal of Best Practices, a primary digital resource for learning, training and developing communities of practice for municipal servants and local council members. VAP will also integrate the popular, established media component, the Municipality magazine, as a self-supporting publication firmly embedded in the community of municipal servants;
• VAP will help the State Personnel Service (SPS) institutionalize the mechanism for training municipal servants and deconcentrate the continuous qualification upgrade training within the professional development system, by involving the regional universities and LSG experts.
• VAP project will provide specific assistance to ULSG, the State Agency for Local Governance and Inter-ethnic Relations (SALSGIR), SPS, the Ministry of Finance (MF) and other national stakeholders to advance several significant legal and regulatory frameworks – including the Code on Local Self-Governance, Law on Inter-budgetary Dialogue - and promote national policy alignment with the key norms and principles of the European Charter of Local Self-Government;
• In parallel, VAP will enable the main national partners for enforcement of existing participatory budgeting frameworks with emphasis on a genuinely representative, inclusive, and gender-responsive local budgetary process, through technical assistance, advocacy and limited civic initiatives funding under a local initiatives mechanism.