resource component of the reforms, while the Business Process Re-engineering has also been difficult to administer, and has turned out to be time and energy consuming. The FCSA is hampered in its supervisory role by structural, staffing, organisational, equipment, and funding problems. 206. The CSAR noted that, although the federal government has tended to follow a tempered approach so that all groups are given an opportunity to take civil service jobs, thereby ensuring that the civil and public service generally reflect the country’s social composition, it has not reserved political positions, at federal or regional level, for women and other marginal or neglected groups. 207. The CSAR findings show that, although selection, promotion and evaluation procedures for civil servants conform to the law, its expert opinion survey tended to cast doubts on the strict application of the merit principle in the civil service. II. Findings of the CRM Measures to Ensure Accountable, Efficient and Effective Public Service Institutions 208. The CRM noted that civil service reform implementation measures have essentially been capacity building programmes, leading to improved quality service delivery and enhanced employee productivity. A central aspect of the reform is to create new attitudes to service and work based on strengthening ethics, accountability and transparency in the civil service, and more widely, in national public political life. In this way, civil service reforms introduced by government intersect seamlessly with the establishment of the FEACC and the Ombudsman. 209. While there has been progress in implementing civil service reforms and achieving desired objectives, it also emerged from the CRM consultations that much remains to be done. A number of constraints to ensuring accountable, transparent, effective and efficient public service institutions require more sustained and determined political will to tackle and remove them. Among these constraints, the CRM noted, were capacity constraints, the perception that political patronage and not merit tends to influence the public service rewards and sanctions system, low remuneration, corruption, the tension between equity (representativeness) and merit in recruitment and promotion, and weak administration at the kebele level. There is a pressing need to address the challenges posed by these constraints. - 101 -