Against the backdrop of over 20 years of incremental but uneven efforts to overhaul Haiti’s public financial and economic management systems, a high-stakes working session was convened this week to assess progress, address persistent bottlenecks, and map out the next phase of reform. Hosted by Sandra Paulemon, Haiti’s Minister of Planning and External Cooperation, the gathering brought together senior members of the country’s Commission for Public Finance Reform and Economic Governance (CRFP-GE) to align stakeholders around a renewed push for systemic change.
Opening the session, CRFP-GE coordinator Charles Cadet offered a retrospective on the decades-long reform trajectory that Haiti has pursued in the public finance and economic governance space. He walked attendees through the commission’s core priority areas, and summarized the outcomes of years of implementation efforts, which he characterized as mixed — acknowledging incremental gains while noting major unmet goals that have held back broader progress.
Much of the session was dedicated to technical, in-depth discussions centered on the reform initiative’s six foundational pillars. These pillars cover critical domains of public financial management: boosting domestic revenue mobilization to reduce reliance on external funding; upgrading integrated systems for statistics collection, strategic planning, program development, and public budgeting; modernizing public treasury operations and standardizing public accounting practices; strengthening governance and oversight of local public finances; enhancing regulatory control, increasing government transparency, and expanding anti-corruption enforcement; and advancing the development of the national State Finance Information System.
In addition to progress updates on each pillar, technical leads outlined an ongoing comprehensive review of the entire national reform strategy, a process that is being carried out with targeted technical and financial support from the European Union. This review is intended to address existing gaps in the current framework and align the reform agenda with Haiti’s pressing economic and governance challenges.
In her closing remarks to the working group, Minister Paulemon outlined clear expectations for accelerated, tangible outcomes from the reform process. She emphasized that a well-defined, structured, and impact-focused action plan is non-negotiable for driving meaningful change, and called for far stronger coordination across all public and private stakeholders involved in the initiative.
Paulemon specifically advocated for improved synchronization across all public institutions that play a role in public finance management, stressing that systemic reform depends on enhanced connectivity and interoperability between agency systems and workflows. “Sustainable, long-lasting results from this reform simply cannot be achieved without effective alignment across all actors,” she noted, pushing for the creation of integrated institutional mechanisms that streamline information sharing, unify policy action, and create a more cohesive, harmonized governance framework for Haiti’s entire public finance system.
The working session concluded with concrete next steps to advance the reform agenda, most notably the announcement that the first statutory meeting of the reform’s Strategic Steering Committee (COPIL) will be held in the near term to formalize the revised strategy and approve the new action plan.