According to the EU representative, Angola has made important progress as a result of the ongoing reforms for macroeconomic stabilization.
Among the advances already made, Jeannette Seppen highlighted the reform of the legal framework, the timely and frequent publication of reports on the use of budgetary resources, the level of audits of national accounts by the Court of Auditors, measures to rationalize public expenditure, with significant gains in non-oil tax revenue and a notable decrease in non-essential expenditures.
The official also cited the fiscal policy measures, which still allowed in 2021 a significant reduction in the public debt-to-Gross Domestic Product ratio.
"This progress is an indicator of the positive trajectory of change, which the country has been recording in its public finance management system and is a clear sign that it intends to move forward in a determined way to achieve the consolidation of the external and fiscal balance of the Angolan economy", she said.
According to the EU representative in Angola, these reforms also indicate that the country intends to create the conditions for an effective diversification of the economy, in order to promote sustained and sustainable growth.
The field of public finances has been one of the privileged areas in EU cooperation with Angola, whether in terms of regional cooperation with the PALOP-TL, as in the case of this project, or in the context of bilateral cooperation with other interventions, underlined Jeannette Seppen.
"Aware of the enormous importance of public finance management for sustainable economic and social development and in the context of good economic governance, the EU has been giving priority to interventions in these areas", she said.
The EU's representative in Angola said that the aim is to adopt the best internationally recommended practices and invest in new technologies, in particular digitization, with tools and instruments for overcoming technological stages for developing countries, with civil society being one of the essential foundations of this process, in the proximity of the citizen and the defense of their rights.
Despite the growing "and increasing and intense" presence of civil society organizations and institutions, such as universities, business associations, in these processes, "the participatory role of civil society organizations in the processes of discussion, analysis and decision of budgets and of public accounts has been reduced and their capacities need to be reinforced", considered Jeannette Seppen.
"In this sense, this platform that we launched today intends to constitute another instrument to support the intervention of this invaluable group and at the same time a tool to promote budget transparency in the management of public accounts", she stressed.
The area of public finances "has been one of the main focuses of EU support in the last decade and will continue to be so in the framework of both regional and bilateral programming, for the period 2021-2027. There are three years left to reach all the targets of the 20 -30," she added.
Ambassador Jeannette Seppen was speaking this Tuesday at the presentation ceremony of the Civil Society Online Platform for Budget Simplification and Analysis PALOP-TL [Portuguese-speaking African Countries and Timor-Leste] "e-Budget".
The "e-Budget" concerns the online platform that will bring together the budgets of the State of the PALOP and Timor-Leste, an unprecedented initiative financed by 4.5 million euros by the European Union, which was launched this Tuesday in Luanda.
Speaking to the Lusa agency, the main technical advisor of Pro PALOP-TL ISC, Ricardo Gomes, said that this is the first platform worldwide that brings together six countries in the same digital space, presenting the State budgets and their execution until the end of the year. general account, in a simple and interactive way.
Ricardo Gomes also said that the platform allows any citizen, quickly, to understand where the Government has put more resources in the execution of the budget and to do it in a very simple way.
On the other hand, informed the official, the platform will also have a budget transparency index, which shows three simple indicators.
