Report on the Official Launch of the Ministerial Committees for Administrative Reform (CMRA)
- The report locates the reform's starting point in a staffing collapse with two causes, not one: senior officials had already been leaving for career or political reasons, and the January 2010 earthquake killed many high-level civil servants on top of that.
- Geographic concentration is stated as the reason service delivery fails rather than as a side issue. Staff and structures sat in the capital while the nine other departments held what the report calls the illusion of an administration, leaving most of a population it puts at 10 million without access to basic services.
- Recruitment by recommendation rather than competition, and the plain absence of forward human-resource management in many administrations (no recruitment policy, no training policy, no performance appraisal), are named as standing practice, not as isolated failures.
- The ten workshop groups converged on standardization as the first priority rather than on pay or headcount. Titles, functions, responsibilities and privileges standardized across structures, job descriptions, service standards and a defined organizational chart recur across groups, with the explicit justification of removing political grip on ministry structure and of equalizing chances.
- Delegation and budgeting by directorate and by objective were raised from inside the administration, justified as giving directorates real administrative autonomy and an effective capacity to plan and execute, which places program budgeting on the agenda in 2013, two years before the October 2015 decree that made it law.
- The committees were convened at the Prime Minister's request, addressed by the Secretary General of the Prime Minister's Office, and drew customs, the national police, the industrial parks authority, the old-age insurance office, the port authority and the geospatial information center alongside ministries. The reform was framed from the outset as covering autonomous and deconcentrated bodies, not ministries alone.
OMRH's report on the launch day of the Ministerial Committees for Administrative Reform (CMRA), held on 31 January 2013 at the Karibe Convention Center in Port-au-Prince. The CMRA were the focal-point structure through which each ministry and autonomous body was to carry the state reform program inside its own house, so this report is the founding document of that network.
The first part sets out the diagnosis that justified the committees. Senior civil servants had left the administration for career reasons or political ones; the January 2010 earthquake killed many high-level officials and sharpened the shortage. Staff and structures were concentrated in the capital, leaving the other nine departments with what the report calls the illusion of an administration, so most of a population it puts at 10 million had no access to basic services. Recruitment was largely by recommendation rather than by competition, and many administrations had no forward human-resource management at all: no recruitment policy, no training policy, no performance appraisal process. It was on that basis, the report states, that Prime Minister Laurent Salvador Lamothe asked the OMRH Coordinator General to set up the committees.
The body of the report records the day itself: addresses by the OMRH Coordinator General Uder Antoine and the Secretary General of the Prime Minister's Office Lucien Francoeur, a presentation by Deputy Coordinator General Antoine Verdier, the list of ministries and of autonomous and technically deconcentrated bodies present, a question-and-answer session, and then workshop proceedings.
The most substantive part is the restitution of ten workshop groups, reported in full. Each group worked two themes, human resources and administrative modernization, and returned first and second priorities with written justifications, followed by the names and home institutions of its members. Read together they are a bottom-up statement of what officials from customs, the police, the industrial parks authority, the old-age insurance office, the port authority, the geospatial information center and a dozen ministries thought the reform should do first: standardize titles, functions, responsibilities and privileges across structures; write job descriptions and install continuous training; take stock of existing human resources against the new vision; define the mission of the administration and its organizational chart so as to remove political grip on structure; set service standards; budget by directorate and by objective; and delegate authority. The stated justifications are as revealing as the priorities, naming salary disparities, career ceilings, staff retention, corruption and pockets of frustration among the problems to be solved.
How to cite
Office of Management and Human Resources (OMRH), 2013, Report on the Official Launch of the Ministerial Committees for Administrative Reform (CMRA), https://omrh.gouv.ht/Media/Others/6-Notes/rapportCMRA.pdf