Project: Credit Rating

Duration: 6 months, Budget: $120.000
Donor: UN-Habitat
In 2014 the Minister of Municipal Affairs in Jordan has expressed his interest to the director of UN-Habitat’s Regional Office for Arab States (ROAS) in obtaining UN-Habitat’s assistance for rating the credit worthiness of five municipalities in Jordan as a pilot project. The credit rating exercise enabled UN-Habitat to understand more about the limitations of municipal finance in Jordan. The rating aimed at evaluating the municipal creditworthiness and ability of municipalities to meet their financial obligations regularly and to have access to the capital market. The exercise concluded that in addition to opening up the potential to borrow, municipalities can increase local revenue by implementing revenue collection modalities already available to them within current legislation.

Pipeline Project: Jordan Municipal Finance Programme (Phase 2) - Endogenous Revenues Enhancement

Duration: 3 years, Budget: $2.973.263
Donor: USAID
UN-Habitat strongly promotes local empowerment through building strong, local revenue based financial management. This project builds on UN-HABITAT’s municipal credit rating project and aims to strengthen municipal financing through strengthening capacity of municipalities to collect and manage revenues, and generate revenues from a range of sources as well as eventually borrow from the capital market. This will result in increased municipal revenue, strengthened financial independence of municipalities and reduced reliance on donors to support key services provided by municipalities, including garbage collection, roads construction, rehabilitation and maintenance, street lighting and cleaning, sanitation, water supply, pest control, establishment of markets and public parks, town planning activities, prevention of hazards and drainage system management, and others.

This Programme is included in the JRP (2016- 2018), and 3RP 2016. It has also been designed and developed in close collaboration with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs MOMA, Cities and Villages Development Bank (CVDB), and municipalities across Jordan.

Key components of the project include:
(i) Improving municipal financing systems with assessments, ICT technologies and fundamentals.
(ii) Improving local revenue collection by implementing better revenue collection with integrated land value sharing mechanisms and registry systems.
(iii) Improving citizen and government awareness, buy-in and political support on the merits of strengthening local finance, and the variety of means to do so.
(iv) Continuing activities from Phase 1, strengthening capacity of municipal lending from capital markets, and access to local financing by integrating information, capacity and development.