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Community Budget Monitors
“We are happy that the sub county budget has included some of the priorities we gave last time when we met with you. We would like to ask that the next year’s budget looks into issues that were left out”.
The civil society in Uganda has also been employing budget processes to address peoples needs and needs based planning, nationally. They have been facilitating the processes of making people centred budgets through community budget monitors and citizens accountability watch groups.
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Community Budget Monitors, Uganda |
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Uganda
 ActionAid Uganda focused on building capacities of communities through building up a cadre of community budget monitors, and formation of citizens accountability Watch Groups on the one hand and network and link these to the national platform. At the National level, a forum of more than 150 different organizations comes together as Civil Society Budget Accountability/Advocacy Group (CSBAG) with the explicit purpose of nationally developing citizens and Civil Society engagement and influence on the nature, process and direction of the national finance for development and budget processes.
In 2007, 114 Community budget monitors have been trained: two subcounties of Mbarara district and in Kawempe, Kampala district. The programme for further training of community budget monitors is underway in one other county and there are plans to build this on a wider basis. Each group was trained on reading community budgets and respond to the budgets based on reading of community needs and agendas. The community budget monitors, in each case were involved in consulting with the communities on the priorities and collectively developing responses to local division level budgets.
The community budget monitors reflected their concerns at the Civil Society Budget Accountability Group (CSBAG). In 2007, the CSBAG convened the dialogue guided by a CS BAG position paper. The position paper was developed through a process of analyzing the Budget framework Paper 2007/2008. This increased citizen scrutiny and influence on national budget allocations. The group was also supported to reflect and strategically plan for their budget engagements for the period 2008-2011. “The citizens are beginning to hold government at ‘ransom’, demanding for all kinds of politically driven deliverables,” said Gerald Twijuke, Senior Policy Analyst ACODE.
In the case of Kwampe, the Communities along with the monitors rejected the division budgets for not prioritizing community needs. Similarly, another group and local CSOs in Mbudibgyo did the “community” gender budget audit of the district for the 2006/7 , found it wanting and has made several proposals for integrating women’s rights perspectives
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