What Are Governments Spending on the MDGs? Petition to Demand Budget Transparency
Helena Hofbauer, International Budget Partnership
The Ask Your Government Campaign is an effort to examine what happens when citizens request from their governments specific budget information related to development issues, including issues addressed in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Over the past four months, civil society organizations in 84 countries have simultaneously posed to their government six questions related to MDGs 5, 7, and 8. [1] Two of the information requests inquire about expenditures on training midwives and the procurement of drugs to reduce maternal mortality. Two questions focus on the predictability and volatility of development aid, and the final two questions focus on government expenditures on environmental protection agencies and fossil fuel subsidies.
Without public access to budget information about government actions to realize the MDGs, citizens, civil society organizations, other stakeholders, and even the UN itself are prevented from holding governments and donors to account. In the lead up to the MDG Summit in 2010, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently released a draft Joint Action Plan that highlights the concern for ensuring greater accountability in the process of achieving MDG goals 4 and 5.
We believe that the Secretary General has an opportunity, once again, to provide leadership toward the realization of the inclusive ideals of the MDGs. His proposed Joint Action Plan and call for greater accountability in the MDG process can be strengthened by incorporating requirements that governments provide detailed and comprehensive budget information on their development commitments. This can be achieved by the upcoming UN MDG Summit taking the following actions:
- Require countries to consistently include additional budget information in the annual MDGcountry reports. Governments currently must generate measurable indicators of progress toward the MDGs under the UN’s DevInfo system (an electronic platform for gathering and generating statistical information specifically related to progress on the MDGs). The budget information that should be required should include budgeted allocations and actual expenditures on key interventions that are linked to these indicators.
- Require all regional- and international-level MDG reports to include annual budget information on government efforts to realize each goal from 2011 to 2015, through an addendum to the MDGreporting guidelines.
- Include measures of budget transparency, such as the Open Budget Index, as an indicator of progress toward realizing the MDGs.
- Provide technical support to governments on how to meet these requirements for reporting budget information, as part of the technical assistance activities for MDG tracking.
- Require donor countries to publish information on their MDG-related funding.
Take Action: Sign the Petition to demand budget transparency from the MDG Summit!
For more information contact, Helena Hofbauer at Hofbauer@cbpp.org or go to:
http://www.internationalbudget.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3653
[1] The effort is coordinated by the International Budget Partnership and involves 84 country-level implementing partners, and 11 international partners – the White Ribbon Alliance, Family Care International, Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program at Columbia University; Publish What You Fund, Oxfam USA, Oxfam Novib, Development Initiatives; World Resources Institute, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Access Info Europe, and the Center for Law and Democracy.