My work in North West Cameroon

Most of my posts have been about life here; but I have not told you much about my work. I am here to support Financial Management in local Councils by working with several VSO volunteers who are doing long-term assignments with the Councils. Most of the volunteers do not have any financial training; so we are creating some specific tools (basically excel spreadsheets) which will allow them to collect, analyse and make use of data in a way that the current manual systems cannot do. One tool, for instance, tracks revenue and expenses by type over a number of years, so that year-to-year and month-to-month anomolies can be displayed graphically. This is very useful in a country where there is a lack of trust in those collecting taxes and spending public money.