Modernizing an institution creates an opportunity to integrate the economic and social development processes with a country's public accounting procedures, human rights protections and maintenance of the national heritage.
Edgardo Maya Villazón, Head of the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia, presented today at IDB headquarters in Washington, DC, the results of a program to modernize this office, called Procuraduría General de la Nación de Colombia (PNG) in Spanish. The program, which received financial and technical support from the IDB, has positively impacted Colombians, who now are more confident in and knowledgeable about the role and functions of the PGN due to the significant improvements achieved in public service quality. In a national public opinion survey carried out in August, 2007, the PGN was selected as the public institution that had contributed most to modernizing the entire country.
The goal of the project was to help modernize the national government by strengthening and consolidating the system of internal controls, and modernizing the PGN in particular, in order to strengthen institutional capacity across the board and in its functional missions at the central and regional levels including activities targeted to: the preventive function, the disciplinary function, the judicial and administrative intervention function, interagency coordination and decentralization/deconcentration.
The program to modernize the PGN (document in Spanish) is considered an example of "best practices" in institutional strengthening in Latin America,