Minister Amara Konneh maintains that Liberia continues to make progress in improving the educational sector but that such feat remains slow and expenditure in the sector poorly prioritized. He warns: “We need to change that.”

According to Minister Konneh, the share of total spending on education in the national budget is low, at around 12%, although donors provide over half of spending in the sector.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is calling on the Board of Governors of the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID) to open up capital portfolio to non-regional members and other institutional investors in the face of the slow payments of capital by regional members.

“The admission of non-regional members will enable EBID to contribute to the economic and social development of Member States through low interest loans,” the Liberian leader suggested adding, “With a larger membership, the Bank will be endowed with greater expertise, and the credibility of its partners would allow it to have access to the markets of non-regional Member States.”

The Ministry of Finance is gravely concerned and disappointed with the New Republic Newspaper’s Tuesday, May 27, 2014 publication captioned: ‘’Liberia’s is doomed”, in which the paper attributed its story to Finance Minister Amara Konneh, suggesting that the Liberian economy was doomed.

The Ministry wants to state emphatically that at no time did Finance Minister Amara Konneh make such statement to the effect that the country was doomed due to the absence of new economic policy that will rescue the perishing and vulnerable economy in the country.

The Ministry of Finance has noted that some Ministries and Agencies may be committing the Government in Contractual obligations which are in excess of the appropriations authorized by the Legislature or without proper observation of the established procurement process, in contravention of the law.

Dispatch from Washington DC

Finance Minister Amara Konneh and delegation at the ongoing Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have held constructive country-level discussions with the Bank’s Vice President for Africa Maktar Diop on support for the Liberia’s development agenda, the Agenda for Transformation (AfT). 

The meeting with Mr. Diop, former Finance and Economy Minister of Senegal, centered on addressing bottlenecks affecting Liberia’s portfolio performance and disbursement rate under the International Development Association (IDA) financing arrangement on key projects, including support to the health sector, direct budget support and financing of the Red Light to Ganta-Guinea Border Road Project.

Monrovia, April 6, 2014: Finance Minister Amara Konneh will lead Liberia’s delegation to this year’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) in Washington DC, USA.

Among the primary events covering the preparation of the FY2014-2015 National Budget is the budget hearings, where the Ministries, Agencies and Commissions (MACs) present and justify their budget requests at the Ministry of Finance.