Many countries in Africa have undertaken major reforms of public administration in recent years. Most of the innovations undertaken with varying success relate to mechanisms to ensure greater efficiency and optimize results. A trend noted in several countries relates to the evolution towards decentralization, an approach that requires capacity building at the level of agents and the adoption of appropriate incentives as well as flexible rules in the management of state agents. Only a few countries in Central and West Africa have faced the difficult issue of remuneration in the civil service.

The incompetent arms of the civil service

The civil service in many countries is characterized by demotivated, poorly trained staff, holding down multiple jobs to compensate for low salaries and concentrated in large urban centers. And yet reforms undertaken in the early 2000s aimed to ensure performance, flexibility, forward-looking planning and capacity building of civil servants. Few States have taken stock of these reforms, because the undertaking is not only costly (…) but the mechanisms in place to ensure foresight in public management are often not well coordinated.

One of the factors of demotivation and inefficiency in the civil service is that of the remuneration system. It has been noted that despite the cost of the wage bill, salaries are not sufficiently incentivizing to retain qualified labor. This is true in several countries whose salary scales ALG has ensured the comparison. However, it would have been good, in order to know the exact situation of civil servant remuneration in a given country, to examine the complex system of non-salary benefits (what we call allowances) which in certain cases, allow the basic salary to be increased very significantly, partly on a discretionary basis. The consequence is that this system creates unjustified gaps in the salaries of civil servants. The reason is that allowances are more likely to be granted in a non-transparent manner. Its opacity prevents us from taking stock of them and proposing the sacrosanct rationalization that has been recommended in several studies on civil service reforms.

The ALG approach to remuneration systems in the public sector

ALG has advised several ministries, particularly in West Africa, to effectively curb the issue of pay and adopt appropriate tools for its management, in line with the objectives set for the civil service in states undergoing full modernization. This is an ambitious process that must be spread over several years and involve various state agencies, to avoid undergoing innovations in the salary system, by forced march because made possible by workers’ demands (strikes in the civil service are legion in almost all countries). The risks are numerous:

worsening the dysfunctions of the system due to the proliferation of benefits and allowances outside the normal salary structure;
increase the opacity of the remuneration structure and make it informal;
encourage the snowball effect, since other groups of public employees are tempted to use the same coercive tactics to also benefit from these advantages.

Beyond reforms, drive change

The ALG approach to controlling the remuneration system in the civil service is based on a human resources management process through the adoption of mechanisms and technologies that ensure its medium-term track record. Our strategy has been developed and refined over the years to establish itself as the one that ensures optimal efficiency.

We have named the “Maison Fonction Publique” approach. When we are called upon to implement it in a country, our experts conduct twelve (12) weeks of assessment and analysis of the remuneration system of civil servants, including a discovery phase, all leading to an action plan for the reform of the remuneration system.

Identifying disparities in the remuneration system and appropriate solutions will provide the Ministry of Public Service with the right information to undertake the necessary changes, in good understanding of the capacities and strategic orientations of the State. The approach begins with the initial stage and ends with the roadmap for the future state. We recognize the importance of the inventory of the remuneration system in the evaluation process to ensure that the expected results are achieved.

Two countries have already entrusted us with studies on their remuneration system and the results have been impressive!

The ALG approach

Carrying out the study on the remuneration system distinguishes a rapid results diagnostic phase. This diagnostic assesses the situation of public sector remuneration in relation to what we consider to be good practices in this area. The approach is modular and offers an easily manageable framework for transforming human resources or results adapted to previously identified needs.

Our approach will accomplish the following:

• Determine the mission and objectives of human capital management (HCM) in the overall context of the State’s mission, HR functions, information flows of activities and roles and responsibilities of State personnel.
• Build consensus around the ‘current state’, ‘future state’ objectives, and best (functional) practices that have been deployed in non-public sectors in terms of compensation.
• Develop the strategic framework for salary reforms.
  Identify how technology can be used to enable better compensation practices.
• Determine the conditions for outsourcing analyses and formulate recommendations.
• Identify the processes for reorganizing technical options for internal HR processes in the various ministries and local authorities.
• Build the change management approach and the planning strategy for payroll management.