Public service: towards an allocation of bonuses based on performance in Cameroon?
The concept of performance-based bonuses in the public sector is gaining traction globally as a means to enhance efficiency and accountability. In Cameroon, this idea is being explored with keen interest, particularly in the education and health sectors. The government, with support from international organizations such as the World Bank, has initiated pilot programs to test the effectiveness of results-based financing (RBF).
One such initiative in the education sector aimed to improve school performance by providing grants and teacher incentives for achieving specific targets related to student retention and other factors. This approach aligns with the broader goals of increasing investment in education and making more efficient use of limited resources. The program has shown promising results, with improvements in student enrollment and engagement from teachers, suggesting that performance-based bonuses can indeed have a positive impact on educational outcomes.
Similarly, in the health sector, performance-based financing has been piloted, linking bonuses to the quantity and quality of services delivered by health facilities. This method of incentivizing performance has been accompanied by an impact evaluation to assess its effectiveness.
These initiatives represent a shift towards a more results-oriented public service, where rewards are directly linked to performance outcomes. Such programs are designed to improve transparency, financial management, and monitoring at the institutional level. The success of these pilots could pave the way for a broader implementation of performance-based bonus systems across various sectors in Cameroon.
The move towards performance-based bonuses also reflects a growing recognition of the need for reform in public service delivery. By incentivizing performance, there is potential to foster a culture of excellence and accountability. However, it is crucial to ensure that the criteria for performance evaluation are fair, transparent, and aligned with the strategic objectives of the public service.
As Cameroon continues to explore this approach, it will be important to monitor the long-term effects of performance-based bonuses on public service delivery. The experiences from the pilot programs will be invaluable in informing policy decisions and scaling up the initiative to benefit a larger segment of the public sector workforce.
Each year, the “personnel expenses” section of the Cameroon budget provides for the allocation of “bonuses, gratuities and other non-pay allowances” to civil servants. Unfortunately, not all of these public agents regularly assume their respective work positions while they benefit, in addition to the salary, but also from the related service benefits.
Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute again denounced the phenomenon of absenteeism during a Cabinet Council that he chaired on July 25. “The head of government asked the Minister of Public Service and Administrative Reform to prepare a draft regulatory text, intending to recall the content of the obligation to be present at the workstation as well as the sanctions incurred by offenders, while specifying the procedure applicable to the observation of irregular absence,” we read in the final press release.
Tighten the payment of bonuses
Until now, the payment of bonuses has been incorporated into the monthly salary. Something that does not always make sense with cases of desertion, abandonment of post and absenteeism. To eradicate these practices, the public authorities are thinking about how to establish a system that would allow them to pay bonuses based on performance in the field. “The exhortation that the Minister of Civil Service made to the head of government is that performance be the basis for the allocation of bonuses and various gratuities. They exist in administrations and that they are no longer systematically served to everyone based on rank, quality but that performance constitutes the lever of assessment and analysis”, indicated on national television on August 4, 2024, Serge Tsimi, the head of the Division of Discipline and Litigation at the Ministry of Civil Service and Administrative Reform (Minfopra).
According to our sources, Basic Education officials receive, for example, approximately 17,500 CFA francs each month for technical bonuses, 10,000 for research and the same amount for evaluation, i.e. a minimum of approximately 37,500 CFA francs per teacher. On this basis, with a workforce of 74,130 in 2023, the bonuses for the staff of this ministerial department would therefore have cost nearly 3 billion CFA francs.
More than 6,000 civil servants to be dismissed
The allocation of bonuses based on performance in the field would allow the State to recover funds spent on services not rendered and make some savings. According to data from the Cabinet Council in July, the closing of the phase of clearing disciplinary proceedings recorded as part of the physical counting of State personnel and pay (Cope) should materialize by the “removal of approximately 6,000 public agents whose dismissal or revocation files are in the final phase of processing”.
Although the approach remains implicit for the moment, it should be emphasized that the control of the performance of any State agent remains conditioned by that of the control of the actual presence. To do this, one of the solutions would come from the new IT application for the management of personnel and pay (Aigles) expected in the first half of 2023.
For the Ministry of Civil Service, this biometric-based tool would allow the government to have traceability of the number of state personnel active. But while waiting for this mechanism to come into operation, the Prime Minister instructed the Minister of Territorial Administration to have the prefects and sub-prefects draw up a map of the distribution of civil servants and state agents assigned to their respective administrative units.
