Participatory budgeting in Africa - Volume I: Concepts and Principles
2008
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT); Municipal Development Partnership for Eastern and Southern Africa
How to Use This Training Companion
This Companion is aimed at helping local governments in Africa and other stakeholders to prepare for, design, initiate and manage a participatory budgeting process, by training key actors who initiate the budgeting processes. Hence, the targeted audiences of the Companion are the facilitators or persons who would be assigned to introduce the process in a national forum, or a given city such as central and local government staff, NGO leaders and community practitioners. Decision or policy-makers such as councillors, chief executive officers and civil society leaders is another important category of the
target audience. It is hoped that the Companion together with the Participatory Budgeting Toolkit will serve as key references for transferring the practice of participatory budgeting from Latin American and European cities to English-speaking Africa.
To support this mix of potential users, the Companion has been divided into two parts with nine chapters. Part one is made up of chapters one through five; part two is made up of chapters six through nine.
Participatory Budgeting: An Overview
Participatory budgeting as an innovative approach to budget decision-making was initiated in 1989 by the city of Porto Alegre. After initial experiments (1989-1995) it expanded rapidly to other Brazilian cities (1990 -1995), then to other Latin American and European cities (1995-2000).
Of particular interest is that while there were fewer than five European participatory budgets in 2000, by 2005, at least 50 European local governments had started such an experiment. Most had commenced in France, Germany, Italy and Spain; but there are also cases in Britain, Poland, and Portugal, as well as some developments in this direction in Belgium, Norway, and Sweden (Sintomer et
al, 2005). Currently, therefore, participatory budgeting’s expansion is global and exponential in African, eastern European, Asian and North American cities due to the support of several international cooperation agencies such as UN-Habitat and the World Bank (see CIGU Web site: www.cigu.org).
It has been observed, however, that there is some wide variation in the level of success in these regions in practicing participatory budgeting. Some cities and municipalities have been achieving better results in terms of improved service delivery, local government administration, governance and participatory democracy. Generally, however, the main lesson learnt so far is that as a tool for enhancing social accountability, good governance and decentralized governance, participatory budgeting has resulted in unprecedented political, social, economic and institutional achievements wherever it has been successfully implemented.
Although in Africa participatory budgeting is gaining ground in central and local governments and other institutions, many countries are still plagued by poor transparency and weak accountability. This is due to a closed-door budget process, weak accounting and reporting systems, ineffective audits and exclusion of civil society from dialogue.
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