UCLG AFRICA/ECONOMY AND LOCAL FINANCE DEPARTMENT The decentralization that is now anchored in the institutional landscape of African countries affects powers that were once exercised by the central state at the lowest levels of governance, because they had undeniable comparative advantages. In doing so, in all countries, the decentralization orientation texts distinguish between decentralized competences for which the law defines financing conditions often mixing transfers and local taxation.   However, in practically all African countries, there is a lively debate on the sharing of public resources between the State and local authorities, the latter considering the level of financial decentralization low, while the former claim to have made financial resources available to them. commensurate with the powers transferred. To resolve this debate, it would have been necessary to have in each country an evaluation of the level of financial decentralization allowing to follow precisely the sharing of public resources between the central Governments and the Local and Regional Governments..   Assessing the level of financial decentralization in African countries presupposes first of all facing a first challenge, that of collecting financial data from local authorities. In addition to the fact that the financial data of local authorities are not regularly collected, the use of different accounting nomenclatures, linked in particular to administrative practices inherited from colonization, also makes it particularly difficult to compare financial management performance between countries and between communities. It is with a view to meeting this set of expectations that UCLG Africa has undertaken to develop an African Observatory of Local Finances.   The session aims to formalize relations between the UCLG Africa Observatory and the national institutions that centralize and process local financial data in order to improve the coverage of countries and local authorities concerned by the activities of the Local Finance Observatory.   The objectives of the session are:

1. Mobilize and sensitize in favor of the Observatory, the national institutions which have the financial data of the local authorities;
2. Study and review the practical methods of regularity and exhaustiveness of the collection and centralization of financial data of local authorities at the level of the various African countries and at the level of the Observatory;

• Discuss and agree with the actors concerned the concrete mechanisms for a systematic and regular collection of financial data from local authorities and the verification of their reliability on the one hand and on the other hand the methods of their transmission to the Observatory.