From the 17th – 19th January 2021, H.E Prime Minister, Mohamed Hussein Roble officially launched the development of a new Pay and Grade Structure for the Civil Service in the FGS. By welcoming this long awaited review he mentioned in his speech that:
“The Government of Somalia is committed to implement the policies and regulations for ranking and grading civil servants with reviewing, assessing and reforming of pay and grade structures of government employees, which is a proper step in the right direction”
H.E Minister Duran Farah who’s Ministry is the lead institution in this assignment was also present said:
“Reviewing of the Pay & Grade Structure of the Civil Servants is part of the Government’s efforts to establish a civil servant pay structure with stable and growing standards”
The Chairman of the National Civil Service Commission, Hassan Abshirow mentioned the different circumstances that the civil servants have worked since the civil war. He believes that the employees of the government do not have any real of meaningful distinguished disparity bewteen them based on their skills and tenure and sa or that the change was well needed
Why is there a need?
The current grades of the Government of Somali civil service are set out in the Civil Service Act 2006, also known as Law Number 11.
It is closely tied to qualification levels, rather than job functions, and as such mobility between the grades is extremely limited, restricted by law to occasions when an employee gains a qualification linked to a higher grade, or receives a ‘special merit’.
Currently, in order to attract and retain a particular subset of their needed skill sets, the FGS is providing significantly higher remuneration than the civil service remuneration to occupants of certain positions and are financing those higher pay levels with donor-provided funds
The two-tiered salary scheme has some inherent fundamental problems of pay inequity and has significant impact on staff morale as a result of the carving out a subset of the civil service and providing staff within that subset with significantly higher remuneration.
Overal Objectives:
The overall objective of the pay and grading reforms exercise is to establish the relative worth of jobs and develop policies to guide the remuneration and subsequent review of pay for civil servants in the FGS.
The aim is to come up with a harmonised civil service-wide job grading structure that takes into account more robust factors. Career paths and progression guidelines for the civil service will be developed to avoid employees being stuck in their careers.
This will address the current inequalities and disparities in pay and facilitate career progression.
Specific objectives:
- Ensuring fiscal sustainability of the overall wage bill
- Ensuring consistency of competitiveness of total remuneration across types of positions/career streams.
- Offer definitive advice and guide on options for transitioning donor-financed positions to civil service status pay.
- Ensuring complete coverage of new job descriptions and job evaluations, so as to provide accurate projections of overall wage bill impacts of proposed new pay scale.
- Building in-house capacity to continuously undertake pay & grading for new or revised jobs (job descriptions).
