10 Jun 2018
The Executive Director of the National Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (NANGO), Leonard Mandishara attended the Budget Transparency Stakeholders’ Workshop in South Sudan from 6 to 11 June 2018.
As part of his presentation, Mandishara highlighted challenges encountered in Zimbabwe seeing as the Open Budget Survey (OBS) is a new process in the country.
With regards to budget transparency in Zimbabwe there has been limited cooperation from the key institutions, ignorance of the process and what it measures, lack of appreciation of the key facets of the survey, government peer reviewer response low and produced documents were not shared publicly.
As a result, out of 100 Zimbabwe’s score was 20, 35 and 23 in 2012, 2015 and 2017 OBS, respectively.
According to analyses by NANGO, the significant drop in 2017 compared to 2015 was due to comprehensiveness of Executive Budget Document, failure to publish other documents such as Citizen Budget and Year End Report and late posting of documents on government websites.
Mandishara asserted that following the mentioned issues, NANGO and UNICEF engaged the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development in view to improve budget transparency.
“Positive relationship and collaboration between stakeholders is key for improved OBS, government departments, parliament, supreme audit and civil society as well as the researcher,” said the NANGO executive director.
He added that commitment by all key government institutions is now very high, reform matrix was developed to address gaps, personnel with appropriate experience were attached to the process and NANGO was tasked to continuously engage institutions.
Civil Society can further contribute to government budget reforms as researchers, through collaborations, playing the watchdog role on budget processes, build capacity of key government institutions and lead the sensitization process, engage consistently throughout the entire budget process, liaise with the tasked researcher, educate the public on budget processes to raise the demand side as well as carry out analysis of the budget to inform policy makers.
