Workshop on "Open and Accountable Budgeting" concludes

A five-day workshop on "Open and Accountable Budgeting" concluded in the federal capital city of Kathmandu on Friday (April 22). Organized by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) and Freedom Forum, the workshop honed civil society organization representatives' skills on analyzing budget, generating evidences for advocacy, participating in budget process with facts and figures and engaging with budget accountability actors in every stage of budget cycle.

The course on open budgets and accountability was designed and the workshop was organized to explore an opportunity to build a fair and just world, said Warren Krafchik IBP Executive Director. "This is an ambitious statement to make in a world just clawing its way out of a pandemic, amidst rising poverty and declining democracy. But this is the opportunity that we have before us if the public, and not special interests, drive public budgets", he noted.

Research shows clearly now that opening budget processes is a best chance to make sure that scarce public resources flow to those that really need them the most. In this context, he further said that public budgets deepen democracy and development. "Yet, despite the evidence, budget processes in most countries in the world still shut out the majority of the population. It is time to change these archaic practices and put the public at the centre of public budgeting". The workshop was the start of an exciting process to do so, claimed Claire Schouten, Senior Programme Officer of IBP.

The workshop provided an opportunity to the participants to better understand how governments raise and spend public money – that is your money – and begin to use this knowledge to shift power in the country. Freedom Forum Chief Executive Taranath Dahal shared that the workshop developed the knowledge of participants on the budget cycle, actors involved in the budget process, timeline to do advocacy for open budgets and tools to generate and use budget information for analysis. "We had invited the responsible authority from parliament and Office of the Auditor General of Nepal to to offer opportunity to the participants to interact on their roles in open and accountable budgeting, especially in the oversight stage of budget process", he added.

The workshop was facilitated by Suad Hasan, Claire Schouten, Alexandre Ciconello and Krishna Sapkota. Some 20 participants representing CSOs from different provinces had actively taken part in the course. As informed, the participants had attended 10-week long Ruzuku-based online course on open nad accountable budgeting before attending the in-person training. 

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