Sector strategies are crucially important for any country but even more so in a developing country context.This is because they must also address growth: they inform citizens what they can rightfully expect as service levels, they provide a reference framework for performance, they send signal to business in and outside the country on the direction of policy and opportunities for investment. They also determine the strategic posture adopted by a country on its fiscal policy. For many developing countries the Millennium Development Goals are implicit in their national development frameworks and articulated in the sector strategies.
The specific sectors covered in the courses in the idilmat programme all have a major impact on the economy of a country, whether, for example, through the size of the teachers' and nurses’ payroll and their growth dynamics contingent on negotiations or conditioned by investments in infrastructure. Strategies also provide the framework for recurrent expenditures, on salaries, on subsidies and on government procurement.
idilmat has developed a series of professional development workshops that address issues of policy, budget formulation and financing to implementation. The professional development workshops provide robust analytical frameworks to test the viability of various strategies within a fiscal framework mindful of cost drivers and other parameters that impact their evolution overtime. The potential for each sector to impact a country’s economic and social development using different strategies is assessed.