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afrol News, 5 February - The Cape Verdean government is set to enhance its efforts to decentralise and privatise its large state-controlled sector. Several projects are already operating, and today, a wide-ranging agreement with France was signed in Praia. According to the Cape Verdean press agency Inforpress, representatives from the French government today signed a finance agreement worth 610 million euro with representative of the Cape Verdean government. The aim of the development agreement was consolidating of the process of decentralisation in the country. Cape Verde has been in a process of decentralising and privatising its state-controlled activities since 1992, following the introduction of structural adjustment programs by the IMF and Worldbank. The reform work was enhanced by the new government that assumed power in February 2001. According to the IMF, Cape Verde made progress in its comprehensive privatisation program, "a key element of the domestic debt-reduction operation." The IMF had however criticised the Cape Verdean government of having achieved "little progress ... on the structural front in 2000." Recognising a "sizable deterioration in the macroeconomic situation" (Carlos Duarte Burgo, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning), the new government committed itself to a substantial reduction in the overall fiscal deficit and further structural reforms. While the privatisation part of Cape Verde's reform programs slowly has made progress over the last ten years, decentralisation has lacked behind. The German cooperation agency GTZ has been involved in a prestigious electrification and water supply project on the Cape Verdean islands of Fogo and Brava under its decentralisation programme for over two years. No results have however been produced as local "authorities have not been able to meet the legal and administrative conditions agreed upon," GTZ coordinator Bernhard May told afrol News. With the new agreement between France and Cape Verde, however, decentralisation is to take on new proportions, not achieved under local projects by several not coordinated donors earlier. France, known as Western Europe's most centralised country, was however go into "close partnership" with the Cape Verdean government on the process of decentralisation.
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