Priority area Decentralisation and good governance Strengthening municipal structures
Spice trade on the market in Niamey, Niger
Germany is assisting the Niger’s municipalities in developing local governance structures in a variety of ways. For instance, development plans have been drawn up for projects in selected municipalities. All sectors of society were involved in drawing up these plans.
At the national level, Germany is advising the Niger’s government on the drafting of a decentralisation strategy. Germany is also involved in the development of a training centre for municipal employees.
One key task for the Niger government is to set up an instrument for sharing revenue nationally. Germany is supporting ANFICT, the agency for financing local and regional authorities. The job of this authority is to administer various support budgets centrally and to ensure that spending is transparent and that local communities have sufficient funding.
The various tools of German development cooperation are deployed in such a way that they are mutually complementary. The bilateral investment fund for decentralised authorities, FICOD (Fonds d’Investissements des Collectivités décentralisées), managed by KfW Development Bank, provides municipalities with the funding to improve economic, social and public infrastructure. Local government representatives are given advice and training by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) to enable them to draw up their own local development plans, which can then be used as the basis for applying for financial support from the Fund. Funding requests can be made, for example, to finance the building of schools, repairs to health centres and bus stations, the setting-up of markets and the building of access routes connecting villages to trunk roads.