Programme 2: Budget Transparency and Accountability

Good data is essential for policy formulation, the monitoring of spending programmes, and legislative and public oversight. It guides actions that can lead to greater value for money and eliminate inefficiencies.

The new CABRI PFM Knowledge Hub, an online platform for knowledge on public financial management, includes Budgets in Africa, a repository of budget speeches, estimates of expenditure, tax proposals and many more budget-related documents of 28 African countries. Open access to this resource is enabled by the ‘budget enquirer tool’, which allows the user to search by country, year (over a five-year period) and document.

The launch of Budgets in Africa in July 2016 was preceded by the design, research, data collection, categorisation, tagging and indexing of budget information during the 2015/16 reporting period. Coverage of five years of budget documents from 28 countries will expand to all 54 countries by December 2016. The next phase of Budgets in Africa will include budget analysis.

The Hub will also feature the report on the second African Budget Practices and Procedures (BPP) survey. The survey of 23 African countries^[1] was started in 2015/16, and included an independent review of country responses and a data validation workshop for all participating countries.

The BPP survey process provides budget practitioners with a useful assessment of their current institutional arrangements, practices and procedures, and allows for comparability across different administrations. The results of the survey will be published in a collection of reports that will be available on the PFM Knowledge Hub in 2016/2017.