Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program

The Governance and Economic Management Assistance Program (GEMAP) was a governance and public financial management program in Liberia, launched in September 2005 by the Liberian government and the international community through the International Contact Group on Liberia (ICGL). It was intended to strengthen financial controls, reduce corruption, and reform economic governance after the Liberian civil wars. The program ended in October 2009, when remaining signatory authority under GEMAP reverted to the Government of Liberia.¹ It was later followed by the Governance and Economic Management Support (GEMS) program.

The design of GEMAP began shortly after the end of Liberia's fourteen-year civil war in 2003. The war ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) on August 18, 2003, resulting in the resignation of Charles Taylor, President since 1997.² A national transitional government (NTGL) was established to follow a timeline leading up to an election slated for 2005, with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf assuming the presidency on Jan. 18, 2006.

After a 2005 European Commission audit of Liberia's Central Bank and five state-owned enterprises revealed systemic corruption, the international community began to discuss how best to respond to the ongoing corruption before the country relapsed into civil war, and thus GEMAP emerged with the purpose of:

“To ensure that all Liberian revenues will be available for the benefit of all Liberian people, to ensure that the Liberian Government will have the appropriate fiscal instruments to capture the revenue required for the development of the country, and to strengthen Liberian institutions so that they can take responsibility for reversing decades of deficiencies in economic and financial management, the NTGL and its partners have concluded that immediate remedial action is needed.”³

The program was designed and funded by the IMF, World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department and USAID. United States Government-funded GEMAP activities were implemented by IBI, Segura, and TRAWOCO.⁴ It involved embedding non-Liberian financial controllers within Liberian institutions. These “advisors” had co-signatory authority over major financial transactions. The six GEMAP components were:

1. Financial Management and Accountability
2. Improving Budgeting and Expenditure Management
3. Improving Procurement Practices and Granting of Concessions
4. Establishing Effective Processes to Control Corruption
5. Supporting Key Institutions
6. Capacity Building

The four state-owned enterprises addressed by the program are:

• National Port Authority (NPA)
• Liberia Petroleum Refining Company (LPRC)
• Roberts International Airport (RIA)
• Forestry Development Authority (FDA)²

Assessments of GEMAP have been mixed. Hope described GEMAP as an innovative but intrusive donor intervention in public financial management, and argued that it contributed to increased government revenues, stronger cash-based expenditure controls, and the resumption of government audits after many years.¹ Government revenue rose from $85 million in fiscal year 2005–2006 to $148 million in 2006–2007, $207 million in 2007–2008, and $235 million in 2008–2009.¹

A 2010 evaluation of USAID-supported GEMAP activities, conducted by International Development Group, found that GEMAP did not eliminate corruption but helped introduce processes that made corrupt practices more difficult.⁵ The same evaluation noted weaknesses in monitoring, including indicators that focused more on project outputs than on impact.⁵

Criticism of GEMAP focused on its perceived infringement on Liberian sovereignty, its reliance on internationally recruited experts with co-signatory authority, and its limited success in building long-term local capacity.¹ Hope argued that capacity building was the program's weakest component, noting that skills transfer and institutional development did not fully meet expectations.¹

GEMAP has been discussed as a possible model for donor engagement in post-conflict and fragile states, but scholars have cautioned against treating it as a directly transferable model. Hope argued that while some elements of GEMAP could inform future governance and economic management programs, any similar intervention would need stronger attention to country ownership, capacity building, and local political context.¹

Later work on institutional integrity cited USAID support for GEMAP as an example of anticorruption programming that combined efforts to build institutional competence and integrity with measures to deter, detect, and punish corruption.⁶

GEMAP was followed by the Governance and Economic Management Support (GEMS) program, a five-year USAID-supported public-sector capacity-building program in Liberia. GEMS was designed as a follow-on to GEMAP and focused on strengthening financial, organizational, and performance management in Liberian institutions.⁷ It also supported civil service training, concession management, ICT policy, and Central Bank payment-system reforms.⁷