Citizens' budget

Citizens' budget

To share information about a budget in a clear and simple way.

Budgets reports are often very long and written in complicated technical language, which can make it difficult for citizens to understand them. In a number of countries, governments now produce simplified, short and easy-to-read citizens’ budgets. However, these usually focus on the national budget and might not contain a lot of detail about the the local and provincial levels or about the specific budget programme that you want to analyse.

If simple budget information is not made available by the government, you might decide to produce a simple guide to the budget in your area, perhaps as part of a budget tracking process. This might include information on:

The budget cycle.
How much money the sector you are interested in will receive and a comparison with other sectors (e.g. education, health, etc).
How much money has been earmarked for the poor and other marginalised groups.
How money is disbursed.
Who is responsible for spending at different levels and at every stage
Other issues and problems identified.

The guide could be presented in a number of ways, ranging from a simple brochure with pictures and illustrations, to a more comprehensive report.

Developing such a guide can deepen an organisation's own expertise and knowledge on the budget process. It will also provide an easy way of sharing with other organisations and citizens involved in the budget tracking process (either as members of a budget tracking team or as respondents), or members of the general public who are affected by budgeting decisions.

References

Comments

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Gift Omoniwa Wed Jun 16 at 06:06:52 0 like
very interesting tool.opened the eyes of the people to what the Government have been denying them of.
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Ruth Masime Wed Dec 16 at 07:12:10 0 like
It did for me too
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Karen Jørgensen Mon Dec 16 at 01:12:57 0 like
Thank you Abel for sharing this! How did you change the misconceptions? Did you dialogue or was informationsharing enough? What was the reasons behind the misconceptions?
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Abel Mavura Thu Dec 16 at 05:12:54 1 like
Thank you Karen for asking the question. I wanted to keep my story of change thus the reason I didn't dwell much on the problem background, however to answer your question, these where due to the negative cultural practices and the societal beliefs . We used drama to enlighten them about the consequences of the practices and how best they can enjoy the practices that we were advocating for. Usually when we do community forum theatre , we do what we call post performance discussions whereby we open up for dialogue and get contributions from the audience or the members watching the play , we ask them on what they learnt , what could be the best approach of this character and what do we think is best for our community? We don't impose things to them but we share , do Dialogue and come up with best act of the drama which includes them.
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