Maravi

Panos calls for engagement of the poor in budget tracking

Panos calls for engagement of the poor in budget tracking
By Misheck Wangwe in Kitwe
Mon 12 Nov. 2012, 10:00 CAT

PANOS Institute Southern Africa says engaging the poor in national budget tracking and implementation will significantly enhance accountability of national resources.

In an interview, Panos Institute Southern Africa (PSAf) executive director Lilian Chigona said the engagement of the poor in tracking the national budget implementation in communities was critical to fostering meaningful economic development.

She said without a deliberate effort to engage the poor and marginalised in society in budget tracking, the poor would remain sidelined with no platform for engagement.

"Local communities have an important role to play in the budgeting process at various levels and in tracking the use of resources allocated for them in the budget, but they can only do so if they have platforms for expressing views. When a budget is passed, community members need to be empowered with adequate information and skills to understand what has been allocated to them and for what use so that they can actively participate in fostering accountability of public resources," Chigona said.

She said communities could effectively monitor the use of their resources if they know what had been allocated to them.

"It's not adequate to get community voices of before budgets are approved so that they advocate for certain issues, and then leave them out when budgets are being implemented," Chigona said.

She, however, said it was gratifying that Zambia, like any other developing country, was striving to improve its governance systems and structures and had developed several programmes aimed at promoting efficient and effective use of public resources across all sectors.
Chigona said it was not enough to talk about citizen engagement without deliberately making efforts to empower people to participate in resource tracking and other governance processes.

"Unless people have access to quality information and have a platform for engagement, this will remain a dream. As PSAf, we believe that since the targeted beneficiaries for all these public resources allocated to various departments at community level are communities, it is only right that they should be empowered to actively monitor and track the flow of budget implementation," said Chigona.

Labels: BUDGET, CORRUPTION, LILIAN CHIGONA, PANOS

posted by MrK @ 4:21 PM