Policy Forum has released a simplified version of the national budget for the financial year 2010/11 as part of its objective towards encouraging active citizens' voice through the popularisation of government documents. Policy Forum believes and making budgetary information more accessible to the…

Electricity Governance Initiative in South Africa has released a groundbreaking report, “The Governance of Power: Shedding Light on the Electricity Sector in South Africa.” The report, coordinated by Idasa, contains hard-hitting analysis of the governance challenges facing key national institutions,…

This years' budget was prepared at a time when the country had received adequate rains and against a backdrop of political stability and an economy that had showed signs of recovery.

This is a challenging time for Africa. The combined effects of the global economic crisis, the need for equitable allocation of natural resource assets, and the ever-changing balance of influence and power between the developed and developing worlds are requiring African countries to re-evaluate their…

In recent years the Honduran municipality of Puerto Cortés has received significant attention for managing its own water and sanitation sectors. National reforms made this possible.

Governance as the exercise of political authority for purposes of managing the affairs of a society has been around throughout the history of mankind. Its formalization in the era of the modern political state has sharply brought to focus the reciprocal relationship between the state and her citizens.…

The last two decades have shown that it is possible to defeat the scourge of poverty. Progress has not been uniform across countries, and there have been setbacks and disappointments. But overall, the rate of progress in reducing poverty and in increasing access to basic health, education, water,…

Poor transport networks are a huge obstacle to economic growth in Tanzania. To address this, significant money is allocated in the budget to infrastructure development.

We strongly believe that people are at the centre of a comprehensive and sustainable social and economic development framework. At the end of the day all activities of the government must create positive impact for people. Since the people comprise heterogeneous groups which face different realities,…

Based on a review of 50 country studies, this Assessment finds that the resources and know-how necessary to achieve the MDGs exist. Acceleration of progress over the next five years will need to focus on continuing proven strategies, policies and interventions and making a radical break with those…

The WaterAid paper Water utilities that work for poor people - increasing viability through pro-poor service delivery discussed the need for specific pro-poor measures to ensure water service provision to poor urban populations.

Taking into account the needs, priorities and opinions of both women and men of the territory, ensuring that both benefit equally from social change and economic growth, and that gender inequalities are eliminated, are all essential for the success of any local economic development (LED) strategy…

The Social Development Network’s main aim is to promote and facilitate effective strategic alliances among members and interested groups within Kenya. As a network, SODNET’s mandate is anchored on the need to restore the institutional integrity and civic sovereignty of the social sector. INFONET,…

The CoST Working Paper Series is intended to support the rollout of CoST and transparency in the construction sector more generally. This note summarizes the series.

Lagos: The Nigerian Procurement Observatory is now live, online real time. The Observatory is a procurement monitoring web portal, developed in consultation with many NGO's and development agencies in Nigeria. It provides free online…

The workshop, which was organized by Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) in collaboration with Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), had a consortium of CSOs and other Non-State Actors (NSAs) in attendance.  Also in attendance are the Executive Director of CISLAC Auwal Musa Rafsanjani…

Access to quality services – in particular in health and education – has been recognized as fundamental for wellbeing and economic development (World Bank, 2003). However, in Africa and other developing countries, service delivery is often poor or nonexistent: schools and health clinics are not open…

Transparent budget processes are critical in democratic societies and citizens have the right to know where and how their resources are being invested. In Mozambique, where nearly half of the budget is financed by external aid, aid transparency becomes an important factor in supporting this democratic…

With the recent wave of democratisation in southern Africa the emphasis is now on how to improve the system of local government. Democratisation in the region marked the development of municipal legislation which requires not only that policies, structures and processes change, but that the very culture…

Nigeria is fifty years old having gained independence in 1960. Fifty years is a significant year in the life of any organisation or nation. It is the year of jubilee and it has symbolic and spiritual significance. It is therefore a good year to reflect on the challenges facing the nation.

In March 2010 delegates from 17 countries and 3 continents met in Nairobi, Kenya for a Pan-African Conference on Tax and Development. Hosted by Tax Justice Network for Africa, the conference had three key themes: harnessing domestic tax policies for development; taxation of extractive…

Throughout the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, public resources are commonly used to solve the physical and social integration problems of illegal city neighbourhoods. These settlement upgrading programmes, as they are known, are integrated interventions financed with resources from central,…

Scandals involving public officials have often captured world attention. Most of these scandals are as a result of the deteriorating ethical behaviours of the public officials who have indulged themselves into all sorts of malpractices. There is therefore a genuine demand that public sector institutions…

On the 24^th and the 25^th of August 2009, a conference took place in Windhoek, Namibia with the title: Southern Africa: 2020 Vision. Public Policy Priorities for the Next Decade. The conference brought together academics, civil society activists, politicians and…

The corruption that often captures newspaper headlines and provokes worldwide public disapproval is dominated by loud “big-time corruption,” notably administrative and political corruption at the highest government levels.

Forum Syd is seeking the services of a qualified consultant to carry out a baseline study for the Social Accountability Program in Tanzania.

AWEPA and the Spanish Senate hosted the EU Presidency Seminar on Africa entitled “Parliament and the MDGs in the Context of the Changing Aid Architecture: Prioritizing South-South Cooperation and NEPAD”.

The CRC methodology is based on the premise that feedback on service quality, collected from communities with the help of a sample survey, provides a reliable basis for communities and local governments to engage in a dialogue and partnership action to improve the delivery of public services.

This is the fifth year since Government formally moved to a system of Programme Budgeting. This move changed the essence of the budgeting approach from a budget system based on the cost of desired inputs to a budget system linked to the results expected from the proposed expenditure.

This briefing paper makes the case for the introduction of a Citizens Budget for Namibia. Such an easy-to-read, simple overview of the budget highlights would allow a larger share of Namibians to understand the National Budget and make their voices heard when it comes to formulating its priorities.

Fifty five representatives of Civil Society Organisations attended a national consultative meeting in Dar es Salaam from the 18^th to 19^th of January, 2010 to discuss the MKUKUTA review studies results that will be used to inform on the next drafting of MKUKUTA II.

The paper examines the effectiveness of social audit as a tool to enhance accountability by measuring the impact of social audit on the implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the flagship employment guarantee program of the Government of India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh,…

The USAID/Indonesia Local Governance Support Program (LGSP)1 led by RTI International supported “expanding participatory, effective and accountable governance” through an integrated set of assistance activities engaged with local governments (LGs), legislative councils, and civil society organizations…

Purpose: This report was commissioned by the NTA (National Taxpayers Association) to gauge citizen perceptions of public accountability in Kenya. The study will be used to design a more comprehensive quantitative survey to inform strategy and mechanisms for improved citizen participation…

In 2008/09 the National Taxpayers Association (NTA) undertook an assessment of roads infrastructure across Kenya to gain an in-depth understanding of the extent to which the Government of Kenya and citizens (who pay for roads infrastructure through taxes) were getting value for money.

These preliminary submissions are presented by Idasa in response to the invitation by NERSA to comment on Eskom's application for a multi-year determination regarding the amounts it charges for electricity (referred to as the "MYPD 2" or the "tariff application"). Idasa acts as secretariat to the…

Idasa’s Public Expenditure and Smallholder Agriculture Project held a conference with the theme, Governance and Small Scale Agriculture in Southern Africa, from November 9-11, 2009. The aim of the conference was to facilitate deliberations on topical agriculture-related issues that affect…

Constituency Development Fund (CDF) schemes are decentralisation initiatives which send funds from the central government to each constituency for expenditure on development projects intended to address particular local needs. A key feature of CDF schemes is that Members of Parliament (MP) typically…

This desk study examines the support to Local Government Capital Development Grants (LGCDG) System in Tanzania as a case study of Sector Budget Support.

This Guide is intended to respond to an increasing demand from UNDP Country Offices and a wide range of national stakeholders for guidance on the multiplicity of tools and methods that are being used to measure, assess and monitor governance at the local level. The Guide uses the term ‘local governance’…

Local government in South Africa has contributed to the achievement of a number of significant social and economic development advances, since the ushering in of the new democratic municipal dispensation in December 2000. The majority of our people have increased access to a wide range of basic services…

Our water, our waste, our town is a guidance and training manual for civil society organisations showing methods and tactics that can be used in taking action to reform urban water and sanitation utitilies.

Government must be more effective in its actions. It must improve the quality of its services. Since 1994 we have successfully expanded access to services. The quality of services has however often been below standard. Massive increases in expenditure on services have not always brought the results…

Growth and development require a long term perspective to frame shorter term trade-offs. A long term plan helps focus government and society to deal with the inevitable short term turbulences in a nation’s progress.

To meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water supply and sanitation, project planners and service providers and the poor themselves in developing countries will have to overcome a number of barriers that impede the improvement of services for the poor. These Guidance Notes identify a number…

This paper analyzes the key aspects of the budget process, the conditions and players necessary for its execution, and the different management models that have evolved. It gives an overview of the debates regarding the budget process and budgeting approaches, with special focus on two alternative…

The Protection of Basic Services (PBS) – Ethiopian Social Accountability Project (ESAP) was designed to engage citizens and CSOs in pilot activities to enhance budget literacy and downward accountability in the context of decentralized service delivery.

The Federal Budget is the Federal Government's instrument for allocating public resources among the nation's competing socio-economic needs. It is a financial representation of government's spending plans for delivering public goods and services to our key stakeholders - Nigerian citizens.

Employing a view of culture as a communicative phenomenon involving discursive engagement, which is deeply influenced by social and economic inequalities, the authors argue that the struggle to break free of poverty is as much a cultural process as it is political and economic.

Nigeria’s Conditional Grants Scheme (CGS) emerged out of (i) the backdrop of an inefficient and top-down public service in which citizens had for long periods lost confidence, (ii) the recognition of the central role of the country’s federal structure to public service delivery, and (iii) the opportunity…

A Iniciativa Colaborativa para a Reforma Orçamental em África (CABRI) trata-se de uma rede pan-africana de técnicos superiores do orçamento afectos aos ministérios das finanças e/ ou do planeamento, criada como plataforma para os seus membros partilharem experiências em matéria de programas de reforma…

The Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) is a pan-African network of senior budget officials in ministries of finance and/or planning, created as a platform for its members to share experiences on budget reform programmes and to contribute towards the efficacy of public finance management…

Dhaka city is the home of more than five million and is one of the most densely populated cities of the world. Dhaka City Corporation is responsible for providing various services to its citizen with its limited resources. ‘Citizen Report Card' is one of the new methods to measure the performance…

The Municipal Development Partnership for Eastern and Southern Africa (MDP-ESA) is happy to announce and welcome old and new members to the ninth edition of ALGAF which runs from February to November 2009. This edition is divided into four modules on: (a) Corruption; (b) Crime Violence and Security;…

This Citizen Report Card (CRC) has been researched and published by the National Taxpayers Association (NTA) to sensitize citizens, elected officials, and civil society rganisations on the management of devolved funds, and the provision of district services.

In 2006, a range of locally based stakeholders in Nairobi launched a Citizen Report Card (CRC) to obtain citizen's experiences on water supply, sanitation and solid waste services.

This brief compares Tanzanian citizens' perceptions of service delivery by local government authorities between 2003 and 2006; summarising their perceptions of the overall quality of local services, as well as their satisfaction with services in the three key sectors of education, health and water.

Participatory water monitoring has an especially important role to play in reducing or avoiding water-related conflict in large-scale, intensive development projects. Conflict tends to arise in situations where expectations are not being met, information is not available, stakeholder engagement is…

This handbook is designed to assist community groups and individuals to understand the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) process and to provide information and skills on how to monitor these funds through a process known as social auditing.

This empirical study looks at coordination and cooperation within five district councils in Tanzania with a special focus on efforts to reduce maternal mortality.

1. Ensuring Good Governance
   
   • Elements of Good Governance Programme
   • Partnerships
   • Legal Reforms
   • Decentralization Framework

• The aim of this paper is to explore by means of selected case-studies how official statistics have been used by civil society organizations to hold public agencies accountable for service delivery or for the effective use of public resources. It…

1. Budget experts everywhere complain that citizens’ seemingly unending appetite for more public services and benefits is not matched by a corresponding willingness to pay for them. The public does not seem to understand the need for short-term fiscal tradeoffs, let alone grasp the potentially…

In 2006, a range of locally based stakeholders in Nairobi launched a Citizen Report Card (CRC) to obtain citizen's experiences on water supply, sanitation and solid waste services. The CRC tool is used to provide feedback to public service agencies on the strengths and weaknesses of their work. CRC's…

This symposium was an important staging point in reviewing the role of Africa local governments in delivering the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The symposium's overall objective was to help strengthen local governance in Africa to enable local authorities to deliver more effective and accountable…