Ramallah – 1/10/2019 – The Ministry of Education and MIFTAH signed a memorandum of understanding and cooperation to continue MIFTAH’s interventions as part of its “Finance for Development” project, which it implements in partnership with and support from OXFAM. The project’s objective is to promote the principles of transparency, integrity and accountability and to apply the principle of monitoring over public expenditure policies within state-run institutions. This is achieved through training and enabling a budget preparation team and specialized parties to formulate a fiscal policy for the education ministry that embodies a participatory approach which would guarantee that the ministry’s public budget falls within the context of a community participatory system. It also aims for sectors targeted by the ministry in its programs and interventions to have a key role in formulating the public budget so that official fiscal policies are more responsive to the needs of various social sectors, in particular the poor and marginalized.

It should be noted that this MoU covers a limited time period, beginning on September 1, 2019 and ending on December 31, 2020. The goal is to carry out the interventions of the aforementioned project in its second phase, for the fourth year running, which began on January 1, 2019.

The MoU, as mentioned in one of its stipulations, is a confirmation of the continued mutual strategic understanding between the two parties whereby the two parties have built on the outputs of this cooperation since 2017. This has been achieved through the Ministry of Education’s follow-up on promoting the participatory approach in the formulation of fiscal policies and integrating targeted sectors into fiscal decision-making in order to guarantee that their basic needs are met. Meanwhile, MIFTAH seeks to recruit the necessary funding based on these outputs in order to resume the strategic understanding and joint cooperation through a new MoU between the two parties in the coming years.