Sound financial management at the local level is one of the 12 Principles of good democratic governance. It helps ensure financial autonomy of the municipality, continuous delivery of public services and demonstrates accountability by the local leadership to its electorate.

The Centre of Expertise for Good Governance is supporting the Slovak authorities to strengthen their capacities on sound financial management by implementing the Council of Europe toolkit Local Finance Benchmarking for local authorities. As a first step, a training for national experts on the implementation of the toolkit was organised on 15 March 2022, online. The experts discussed the adaptation of the tool to the Slovak context and the preparation of a national local finance benchmark. In a series of activities to follow, the experts will provide support to the participating municipalities in their self-evaluation of the financial management practices, with an aim to identify their weaknesses and strengths against the national benchmark and take relevant follow up action.

The activity was organised in cooperation with the Slovak Association of citizens of towns and municipalities, in the framework of the joint EU - Council of Europe Project "Delivering Good Governance in Slovakia II Phase".