One of STAR-Ghana's central goals is to build the technical skills and capacity of civil society in Ghana. Our finance team have been building grantees’ capacity in financial management and reporting.
The focus has been on providing strong technical financial advisory support that creates value and not fault finding. Including, but not limited to:
- building strong internal controls,
- procuring goods and services,
- preparing project financial reports,
- compliance with statutory payments,
- providing advice on recruiting key finance staff
- and embarking on partner financial monitoring.
This support has built trust and confidence, and created an environment of inclusiveness and openness between STAR Ghana and its grantees.
Building strong internal controls
One key way of ensuring value for donor funds is building a robust internal control system. It has been STAR’s heart beat to guide grantees to improve and/or adopt financial systems that build confidence. As part of the internal control processes bank mandates are revised to increase the number of signatories from two to three to avoid the signing of blank cheques due to operational difficulties.
We also develop several finance forms and templates (pettycash payment voucher, funds request form, guest bill, timesheets, attendance record sheet) to enhance payment processes.
Procuring goods and services
We ensure grantees do not adhere to anything lower than the minimum standards when they procure goods and services. Documents covering such payments have to include but not limited to terms of reference, invoices, receipts, and contracts etc.
Preparing project financial reports
As part of our commitment to having a good financial monitoring system, grantees are required to submit a quarterly financial report for review and assessment of progress. Apart from training grant partners in using the financial reporting template, these reports help STAR’s programme management team (PMT) to make timely interventions with respect to budget overruns and adherence to work plans.
The PMT also determine whether a grantee qualifies to receive the next tranche of funds by determining the burn rate and compliance with donor requirements.
Statutory payments
The finance team ensures grantee’s commitment to paying withholding taxes on allowances or services, Social Security and Nation Insurance Trust Contributions, and pay as you earn (PAYE) on salaries where applicable.
Recruiting key finance staff
To ensure there is proper separation of duty and to avoid the situation where one person start and finish processing a financial transaction, we recommend the recruitment of a finance officer to comply with the principle of segregation of duties.
Partner financial monitoring
STAR’s PMT embark on several partner monitoring visits (on-site) to the grantees institutions. These are opportunities to verify expenditure recorded in the financial reports and in some cases meet beneficiaries of the project. When vouching of expenditure is done, queries issued and/or recommendations made are discussed in a feedback session with the grantee’s project team.
These exercises help the finance team to gather learnings that help to improve future partner engagements. Grant partners are often excited by the level of openness and our interest in helping them to foster the use of better financial management systems.
Future plans
During the 2016 election grant call, STAR-Ghana's finance team managed 37 grantees with 40 projects. Experiences and learnings gathered during the election call have already informed the redesigning of templates for budgeting and reporting, and the development of new strategies to create value for the STAR-Ghana programme and wider civil society.