His Excellency Dr. Raed Mohammed Bin Shams, Director-General of Bahrain Institute of Public Administration (BIPA), has emphasized the importance of the public finance program, which has been specifically designed to manage public money. “It is a result of local cooperation between the Ministry of Finance and international partners such as the Singapore Civil Service and Pearson Company that are specialized in developing training contents, in addition to a group of publishing houses specialized in designing training portfolios”, Dr. Bin Shams said.
He pointed out that the program enjoys recognition of many global professional authorities such as the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) of public sector international accountancy and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). The program will offer three professional certificates to public service position incumbents. They are the basic certificate in public finance, the professional certificate in public finance and the advanced certificate in public finance.
Dr. Bin Shams also emphasized the need to intensify efforts to develop national cadres capable of managing governmental financial systems. He stressed that BIPA is eager to enhance best practices based on standards of understanding, application, flexibility and integration. “The program is in line with BIPA’s strategy that targets the optimal management and leadership of available resources and improvement of abilities of staff members of the government public finance sector in terms of the areas of specialization related to the nature of their administrative functions”, he explained.
Dr. Bin Shams concluded by praising the sincere national efforts being exerted by the Ministry of Finance and their endeavours to develop government sector public finance personnel. He valued the directions of His Excellency the Minister of Finance in developing training programs, which meet the training needs of financial position incumbents.
On his part, Mr. Mohammed Ahmed Hassan, Assistant Undersecretary for Financial Affairs at the Ministry of Finance, expressed his pride in inaugurating this professional training program through a partnership with BIPA, the authority responsible for training in governmental functions. “The program mainly aims at graduating high calibers with excellent professional performance that will contribute to increasing productivity and improving quality of government services. Such performance will generally reflect positively on the Kingdom’s policies and financial programs”, he said. He concluded that the program will offer an internationally recognized professional certificate, taking into account the nature of the constitutional, legal and legislative infrastructure governing Bahrain’s government financial functions.