By: David Nuakolo Flomo Jr
0886836401/davidflomojr17@gmail.Com
With Funding from National Endowment for Democracy, BudgIT Liberia, a Civic, Non-political, Non-profit organization is currently conducting a two-day training on Budget Monitoring and TRACKA with about 30 participants from three of Liberia’s fifteen counties in attendance.
Held Under the Theme ” Budget Monitoring Workshop on Enhancing Accountability and Promoting Citizens’ Oversight on Budget Implementation”, the training workshop is intended to ensure citizens have a clear understanding of how the national Budget is crafted and how funds are accounted for through the implementation and monitoring processes of national Government’s projects.
The training sessions are helping participants understand the formulation of the national document and processes to holding leaders accountable for the management or mismanagement of funds by cataloging finished and unfinished government’s projects as well as identifying the need for basic social services in underprivileged communities. The event runs from September 21-22, and is taking place in Sinkor at a local hotel .
Giving an overview of the institution’s activities in Liberia, Abraham Varney, BudgIT Liberia Country lead said the organization work revolves around four key pillars to include Providing simplified access to budgets and related public finance data, Project monitoring for efficient service delivery, Promoting accountability and fiscal inclusion in extractive industries and also provide support to willing government, media and civil society institutions.
“In most cases, citizens blame the government particularly the Ministry of Finance for mismanaging public resources without understanding how the budgeting process works. Despite that, citizens have complained over the years of being excluded from the budget process which should be citizen-centered formulation of the funds” Abraham noted.
According to him, the training will brainwash participants on how it works and what is placed on which line and purpose during budgetary allocations.
He asserted that the training would cover TRACKA, which is one of their key pillars in bugIT and is intended to put government’s feet to the fire to effectively implement public projects and demand public projects in need of communities in their respective counties; thereby referencing it to Nigeria and other places it has worked.
As a Non-political and an internationally recognized institution with headquarters in Nigeria, BudgIT Liberia was established in Liberia since 2020 during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Participants of the training workshop were drawn from Bong, Margibi and Grand Bassa counties.
