Improving education service delivery is difficult when staff lack the skills and experience to effectively manage resources. Although donor investments have significantly improved the Ministry of Education’s (MoE’s) systems and procedures over the last 17 years, much work remains.

The USAID funded Capacity Building Activity held six training activities from March through October 2018 as part of its support to standardize the MoE’s resource planning, allocation, and execution functions. The sessions trained 110 staff from the central MoE, as well as from Balkh, Badghis, Bamyan, Kandahar, and Paktia Provincial Education Directorates (PEDs), on budget preparation and expenditure reporting. The main objective of these training activities was to enhance the technical knowledge and core competencies of MoE staff.

Mohammad Hussain Ibrahimi, General Manager of Accounting in Finance at the Bamyan PED received the two-day budget preparation and expenditure training. The training activity enabled him to successfully lead preparation of the Bamyan PED’s budget for 2019 and submit it for consideration to the MoE annual national budget committee.

“The training has been a unique opportunity for me and the staff to build our skills of budget preparation, program budgeting, provincial budgeting, and expenditure reporting requirements.” Said Mr. Ibrahimi “I’m grateful to USAID for providing us with such an important and beneficial opportunity for improving our workforce at the provincial level. I am sure that the budget execution rate this year will be much better than last,” he added.