newsletter-7-sept-2016

A two-day workshop on Fiscal Transparency Portals, looking at the models of Brazil and Mexico, took place in Jakarta. It was organized by Seknas Fitra, the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia and GIFT, with the support of the Ford Foundation-Indonesia and the OGP Support Unit. It was aimed at representatives from five countries (Canada, Indonesia, Paraguay, South Africa and Vietnam) related to the implementation of fiscal transparency policies as well as those related to information technologies and open data, along with civil society experts in these matters from six countries (Benin, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Vietnam) all of whom can use and replicate the workshop exchanges, lessons and experiences in their countries.
The workshop in Jakarta was quite successful in reaching its goal of familiarizing staff of the ministries of finance with the implementation strategy, contents and operation of successful Fiscal Transparency Portals, learning from the experience of Brazil and Mexico. It was fortunate and highly productive to have two very high level and engaged representatives from the Mexico and Brazil ministries in charge of the transparency portals. This allowed for a better understanding of good practices of fiscal transparency and innovative tools at the international level.
The workshop included a presentation by Open North on their Citizen’s Budget Simulator, a tool used by over 50 cities that helps to build better community relations, educate residents and solicit their feedback on budget issues. An important moment for the workshop was the work around the Open Fiscal Data Packager, with the participation of Open Knowledge International (OKI) that shared the easy steps to use the open spending tool that the Mexico’s Ministry of Finance has adopted to disclose the 2017 federal budget, which was officially launched in early September in Mexico. OKI and the Mexico team showed how they used the tool and shared tech information of their website’s backend, to help countries generate extra budget visualizations on their fiscal transparency portals. By the end of the workshop, five countries committed to explore ways to use the tool for budget information disclosure in open sources after discovering the ease of piloting the Open Fiscal Data Packager.
Throughout the two days and a half of workshop, representatives of the ministries of finance from Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay and Vietnam engaged in break out groups discussions about fiscal transparency improvements through intensive use of information technologies. GIFT was able to clearly fulfill its objectives of promoting peer-to-peer learning and strengthening collaboration among the members of the GIFT action network. The Indonesian Ministry of Finance, at the highest level (Vice Ministry of Finance) was an engaged, generous and efficient host of the meeting.

Find Workshop’s presentations here.

In collaboration with the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico, the Collective for a Sustainable Budget (Colectivo por un Presupuesto Sostenible-Colectivo PE$O), that groups experts budget organizations like Gesoc and Fundar, convened an international seminar to present and discuss two bill proposals aimed to address the need to improve the technical capacities of the Legislature in fiscal matters to receive and handle technically sound information that is non-partisan to engage in the decision-making process; as well as the need to regulate and make transparent public participation in the budgetary cycle process before the Legislature.
GIFT participated in the seminar through the participation of three international experts to share the successful experiences of public participation in fiscal policies in their countries. Jorg Petrovic, Vice-President of the Court of Audit of the Republic of Slovenia, presented their experience in promoting a responsible dialogue in controlling spending and debt. Anabelle M. Atillo, from the Department of Budget of the Republic of the Philippines, discussed their experience in engaging the public in the execution of budgets, through the Budget Partnership Agreements (between an agency and a CSO) and Bottom Up Budgeting practices. Finally, Daniel Avelino, Senior Researcher of the Institute for Applied Economic Research of Brazil discussed this country’s longstanding experience of involving citizens in the budget execution and use of public services, through participatory budgeting and the Public Policies Councils.