A continental knowledge backbone for Public Financial Management reform.
The African Capacity Building Foundation, a specialised agency of the African Union, is implementing the economic and social governance pillar of its 2023 to 2027 Strategic Plan. The pillar prioritises domestic resource mobilisation and improved Public Financial Management performance across the continent. African states have invested heavily in PFM reform over the last decade, supported by diagnostic frameworks including PEFA, TADAT, PIMA, SAI PMF, and MAPS, but the resulting performance evidence remains scattered across reports, institutions, and partner platforms. Senior public officials cannot easily benchmark their systems, learn from peer country trajectories, or convene around shared reform challenges.
The African Capacity Building Foundation commissioned PANEOTECH, in joint venture with JAMII LAB, with funding support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to build the Public Sector Collaboration Hub. The Hub is the continental destination where ministries of finance, supreme audit institutions, parliamentary budget offices, revenue authorities, and regional economic communities access curated PFM knowledge, benchmark performance, exchange reform experience, and engage in peer learning, on a single secure platform.
The mandate. Deliver a continental digital infrastructure that consolidates PFM diagnostics into harmonised performance bands, hosts the analytical case study compendium produced through the parallel research component, integrates with the Ubora Academy, and provides secure peer learning workspaces, all engineered for production-grade reliability and the bandwidth profile of African public sector users.
Six integrated modules, one continental platform.
PANEOTECH leads the technical implementation of the Public Sector Collaboration Hub, with the public-facing platform live at https://pschub.africa and the secure workspace operational at https://app.pschub.africa. The platform delivers six integrated functional modules that bridge fragmented governance data and actionable policy implementation.
Identity and Access Management
Mandatory multi-factor authentication, granular role based access control across four user tiers (super administrators, regional coordinators, public officials, external partners), and session policies tuned for institutional security and operational comfort.
Knowledge and Best Practice Repository
Curated PFM diagnostics, policy toolkits, legislative texts, and reform case studies, organised by thematic area, country, and standardised performance indicator. Tiered editorial workflow for vetted contributions and full content provenance from upload to publication.
Peer Learning and Collaborative Workspaces
Encrypted threaded forums, dedicated communities of practice on budgeting, auditing, and revenue mobilisation, real time co-editing on policy drafts, document version control, and task boards for cross border initiatives.
Capacity Building and E-Learning Hub
Direct integration with the Ubora Academy through secure REST APIs, learning progress tracking on user profiles, native virtual event capabilities with interactive polling, and a categorised archive of recorded sessions for on-demand viewing.
Analytics and Visualisation
Customisable dashboards, cross-country heat map comparisons across reform domains, geospatial mapping for regional performance trends, and interactive visualisations driven by harmonised diagnostic scores rendered in the browser.
Communications and Notifications Engine
Automated email and SMS alerts for new uploads in a user's area of interest, urgent policy discussions, and webinar invitations, with full per-user notification preferences and asynchronous processing that preserves platform responsiveness.
A diagnostic backbone, led by JAMII LAB.
The platform sits on a parallel research workstream led by JAMII LAB, the joint venture partner on this engagement. The research component produces the analytical foundation that determines what the Hub knows, how its diagnostic comparisons are constructed, and which reform narratives it surfaces to its users. Without this research backbone, the platform would be a well-engineered shell. With it, the platform becomes a credible continental reference for PFM reform.
01Diagnostic harmonisation02Ecosystem mapping03Best practices and case studies04Indicator framework and blueprint
Diagnostic harmonisation
JAMII LAB applies a specialised methodology to integrate multiple PFM assessment instruments, specifically PEFA, TADAT, PIMA, SAI PMF, and MAPS. A performance normalisation approach translates the varying grading scales of each tool into a unified system, enabling the cross-country benchmarking and the identification of reform domain performance clusters that the analytics module renders.
Continental ecosystem mapping
A systematic classification of ministries of finance, national treasuries, supreme audit institutions, revenue authorities, regional economic communities, and existing knowledge networks. The institutional stakeholder matrix becomes the directory for the Hub's collaborative workspaces and communities of practice, ensuring the platform complements rather than duplicates existing initiatives.
Best practices and reform case studies
A structured review of available diagnostics across five focus countries spanning the major regional blocs and governance traditions, identifying high-performing systems empirically rather than through pre-selection. Findings are validated through purposive Key Informant Interviews with senior PFM officials, then transformed into structured case studies that detail reform context, institutional drivers, and measurable performance improvements.
Indicator framework and content blueprint
The research component produces the platform content blueprint, including knowledge taxonomy, case study format, and a preliminary indicator matrix that anchors the Hub's monitoring and evaluation framework. The same outputs feed the platform's tagging schema, ensuring every piece of content is classified against the analytical framework.
Engineered for government-grade reliability.
The platform is built on a Laravel and MySQL backend with a React frontend, hosted on a multi-region cloud architecture engineered for high availability across the continent. Every architectural decision is calibrated to the institutional standard the Hub's users expect: encrypted at rest and in transit, multi-factor authentication for every account, accessibility compliant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and performance tuned for the bandwidth profile of public sector offices across all African Union member states.
Multi-region high availability
Multi-region cloud redundancy with automatic failover, ninety-nine point nine per cent monthly uptime target, four-hour recovery time objective, and one-hour recovery point objective for catastrophic failures.
Encryption end-to-end
AES 256-bit encryption for data at rest, TLS 1.3 for data in transit, signed URLs for sensitive document access, and an isolated geographic region for encrypted backups.
Built to scale
Dynamic scaling supporting up to ten thousand concurrent users during peak periods, with React frontend optimisation that holds first-page load under three seconds on standard broadband and remains usable at the lower bandwidth profile of rural public sector offices.
WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility
Full compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 Level AA, including high contrast modes, screen reader compatibility, and intuitive navigation that performs efficiently at low bandwidth.
Built for every African Union member state.
The engagement is structured for delivery between February and June 2026, with overlapping technical and analytical workstreams ensuring the platform is populated with high-quality content from launch. The pilot phase focuses on Public Financial Management initiatives, generating immediate value to AU member states before the platform expands to the wider economic and social governance pillar of the ACBF Strategic Plan.
An AI roadmap to make the Hub a continental AI reference for PFM.
The platform is being prepared for a substantive artificial intelligence layer that elevates how practitioners interact with the Hub, how knowledge circulates between member states, and how the platform supports evidence-based reform decisions. The AI capability is delivered on a dedicated instance of Rafiki AI, PANEOTECH's proprietary AI agent platform, branded for ACBF and addressable through a custom subdomain. The roadmap below reflects the upcoming AI deployment.
Knowledge-grounded conversational AI
A practitioner-facing AI assistant grounded in the full Hub corpus of policy toolkits, reform case studies, academy courses, events, and community forums. Answers cite the original source material and respect the editorial governance of the platform.
Document intelligence
Single-document question answering, automated executive summarisation in multiple formats, structured analytical frameworks on policy documents, and cross document comparison with methodological guardrails that flag analytically unsound comparisons before they propagate.
Semantic search and recommendations
Semantic retrieval across the Hub corpus that returns relevant content even when the user does not rely on the exact source keywords, and smart recommendations that surface related toolkits, case studies, and community discussions based on the content a user is working with.
Multi-channel reach
Hub intelligence extended to WhatsApp and SMS, allowing practitioners to query the platform, receive alerts, and interact with key content from their mobile devices, with optional USSD activation for contexts where connectivity is constrained.
Autonomous content ingestion
An ingestion engine that periodically scans authoritative sources, including ministry of finance websites, the IMF Fiscal Monitor, World Bank, and African Development Bank publications, pre-summarising new PFM reform strategies, fiscal policies, and budget documents and queuing them for administrator review prior to publication.
Cross-country analytical narratives
Structured comparative commentary between countries on specific reform themes, generated under explicit methodological guardrails and queued for administrator review, supporting the production of analytically sound continental narratives at the pace the platform requires.
AI-assisted bilingual coverage
AI-assisted document translation between English and French extending beyond user interface strings into the substantive content corpus, supporting the bilingual reach the Hub requires across African Union member states.
Sovereign deployment option
The AI layer can be hosted on a sovereign African cloud environment where data residency or institutional policy requires it, in addition to the dedicated Rafiki instance branded for ACBF.
Partners and institutional ownership.
The Public Sector Collaboration Hub is being delivered by PANEOTECH in joint venture with JAMII LAB, for the African Capacity Building Foundation, a specialised agency of the African Union, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. PANEOTECH leads the technical implementation across the six functional modules, the cloud architecture, and the upcoming AI roadmap. JAMII LAB leads the analytical and research component, including the harmonised PFM diagnostics, the continental ecosystem mapping, and the structured case study compendium that anchors the Hub's knowledge architecture. The platform is in delivery, with the public-facing site live at https://pschub.africa.
