Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait has announced that the government will launch the first community dialogue on the strategic and financial objectives of the new state budget for fiscal year 2022/23 during January 2022.
It comes in implementation of presidential directives to enhance community participation in determining public spending priorities.
Maait indicated, in a statement on Wednesday, that the draft budget for the next fiscal year will reflect the visions and theses that these dialogue and interactive national platforms produce, expressing the development needs of citizens, which we seek to provide the necessary funding to achieve, in a way that contributes to laying the foundations of comprehensive and sustainable development, improving public services and raising the standard of living consistent with efforts to maximize the optimal use of state resources, achieve more comprehensive growth rates and affect people’s lives, and provide job opportunities.
Maait affirmed his keenness to conduct the series of community dialogues himself, in the presence of the leaders of the Ministry of Finance; to ensure the achievement of the desired goals, in a way that contributes to defining the requirements to stimulate economic activity with the vision of the business community in its various segments, and economists, and the requirements for maximizing efforts to empower women, youth and people of determination by seeing their representatives, and getting to know what is going on in the minds of citizens by seeing their representatives also from members of the House of Representatives and the Senate and to monitor what intellectuals, including university professors, research centres, senior writers and media professionals write, so that we can finally determine the priorities of public spending in the construction and development process that President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi laid the foundations of.
He explained that eight dialogue sessions will be held, with representatives of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Industries, export councils, the Investors Union, the two businessmen associations, the business youth, the joint economic business councils, the House of Representatives and the Senate, women and people of determination, in addition to young executive leaders from the parliament and assistant ministers and governors, symbols of the press and media, economists, university professors and research centres.
He added that we are continuing to enhance aspects of public spending in the new budget for the next fiscal year, to maximize development investments, expand the social protection network, and the human-building strategy by giving high priority to the health and education sectors, and expanding investments in green economy projects, especially that the government aims to improve Egypt’s competitiveness in the environmental performance index by increasing the proportion of publicly funded green investments to 50% by 2025.
The minister said that the electronic budget made us able to determine the size of the state’s public treasury revenues, as well as the volume of expenditures in a momentary manner, and then estimate the correct position necessary to take any accurate decision related to the state’s public finances, especially in light of internal and external crises and challenges such as the Coronavirus crisis.
