“Execution, Not Promises, Will Define Liberia’s Development Path," Minister Ngafuan Demands Urgent Innovative Funding Shift

Monrovia, Liberia: In a sweeping declaration delivered at the opening of a two-day United Nations Country System strategic retreat at a local hotel in Monrovia on Thursday, June 26, 2025, Finance and Development Planning Minister Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan condensed the Government’s ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development into a single imperative “Execution, not promises”, while applauding the UN Country Team’s historic partnership.

By: Abraham Sylvester Panto

Minister Ngafuan insisted that Liberia’s ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development will advance only through an accelerated, innovation-driven financing architecture capable of translating policy blueprints into visible, measurable outcomes for citizens who have grown impatient with aspirational rhetoric.

Positioning the Finance Ministry as the fulcrum of Liberia’s post-conflict reconstruction narrative, the Finance Minister reminded delegates that every national roadmap from the County Development Agenda to the current AAID has been cash-flow-mapped and shepherded by his ministry.

The roadmap now seeks to convert recent macroeconomic stabilization gains into a Launchpad for large-scale infrastructure without overburdening a revenue base still recovering from pandemic-era contractions.

While commending the UN Country Team for anchoring its forthcoming Cooperation Framework in the AAID’s core pillars, Minister Ngafuan asserted that partnership value will henceforth be judged by execution velocity and output visibility.

He stressed that this will be the yardstick that the Finance Ministry intends to embed in a joint performance compact linking disbursement schedules to quarterly implementation audits undertaken by a blended Government-UN verification unit.

Against the retreat’s theme, “United in Action: Building a Resilient Liberia,” participants examined global headwinds—climate volatility, debt distress, and geopolitical fragmentation—before mapping their implications for Liberia’s fiscal space.

This move has prompted Minister Ngafuan to argue that only bold, non-traditional finance mechanisms can insulate national priorities from external shocks while sustaining the momentum of the ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development.

Minister Ngafuan outlined a menu of frontier instruments—diaspora bonds, social-impact securities, carbon-credit swaps, and concessional blended-finance vehicles—designed to crowd in private capital, diversify funding sources, and cushion the public balance sheet against unsustainable debt escalation.

Minister Ngafuan unveiled a contingency-financing blueprint to mitigate potential aid-flow contractions, combining digitized tax administration for enhanced domestic-revenue mobilization with a sovereign liquidity-support window designed to safeguard priority projects from cash-flow interruptions and protect the integrity of the national capital budget.

For her part, United Nations Resident Coordinator Madam Christine Umutoni welcomed the Government’s results-oriented posture and pledged that every UN agency operating in Liberia will realign program budgets with sectoral sequencing, ensuring that resources first reach high-readiness projects capable of delivering tangible outcomes before the following budget year. 

To entrench mutual accountability, participants at the retreat endorsed an integrated results dashboard—publicly accessible and county-disaggregated—coupled with annual implementation audits that will rate both government ministries and UN entities against agreed AAID milestones.