Budget Tracking and Advocacy
The need to be able to work with national education budgets became apparent through our advocacy work looking at non-formal education policies. It is important to be able to track government expenditure in order to measure how well policies are being implemented and to what extent governments are fulfilling their commitments. This requires access to information and can lead on to advocacy for greater government transparency.
At community level the Reflect approach enables people to become involved in decisions that affect life in their communities, for example in their schools, health centres and local councils. This also requires access to information and budget tracking skills, and while local budgets are generally simpler to understand than national ones, access to them can be equally difficult.
Pamoja West Africa has organised three sub regional workshops aiming to build the capacity of communities and development workers to , analyse and track public spending budgets, with the aim of contributing to good governance and management of public resources.
The first workshop, in Dabola, Guinea in 2007, served as a general introduction but it was clear that more specialist input was required and also that the theme was quite new to most participants and required more time. Subsequently two further workshops have been organised,one for francophone participants in Burkina Faso in 2010 and another for anglophone countries in Nigeria in 2011. National Pamoja representatives returned home to make the new learning more widely available and put it into practice through national and local advocacy initiatives.
