Securing timely financial accountability from RUFORUM Member Universities

Accountability in an organization’s financial process plays an important role in maintaining a strong, effective financial control environment. Effective transaction review and approval steps, will reduce the risk of errors, misappropriations, and fraud in the organization’s financial processes. Financial accountability results from holding an individual or institution accountable for effectively performing a financial activity and this applies to Grants awarded by the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM). The successful completion of a key control procedure may, as policy allows, assign the responsibility, but not the accountability, for completing the procedure to another individual or Institution. The Navision system in place at the RUFORUM Secretariat has enabled RUFORUM to track all accountable funds which are advanced to universities, individual students, Principal Investigators (PIs) and RUFORUM staff. Each financial transaction must have an audit trail, enabling the identification of the specific persons handling the transaction at different stages of the process. The Navision system also allows the finance unit to track how the different advances made to an individual or principal investigators as it is the case with the RUFORUM grants that the PIs can have up to several Sub-Grants. The financial transactions must be traceable and accountability well documented. There are many challenges of accountability for NGOs within many developing countries that draw resources from Development Partners such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Mastercard Foundation, Carnnegie Cooperation of New York etc. This paper examines the challenges of accountability for RUFORUM as a case study of NGOs in Uganda to illustrate how some of those challenges are currently being addressed.