International Budget Partnership, Greenpeace, the ONE Campaign, Oxfam Novib, ActionAid, Global Witness, Publish What You Pay, the Revenue Watch Institute, Transparency International and nearly 100 civil society organizations from 100 countries and are heading for  Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to launch a global campaign to make government budgets transparent, participatory, and accountable.

The global Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation wants government finance systems that make all budget information easily accessible, provide meaningful opportunities for citizens to participate in budget decisions and oversight.

The demands of the Civil Society Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability, and Participation (BTAP) are contained in a Declaration of Principles that will be signed at the meeting.

The core demands of the Declaration is that all governments at the national and subnational levels should:

1.  Recognize, legislate, enact and operationalize the right to information generally and to public budget information specifically;
2. Actively engage citizens and all other stakeholders in setting public budget priorities– including para-statal and para-fiscal funds– as early and inclusively as possible,
3. Produce, and publicly discuss, in a timely fashion, at least eight key budget documents: pre-budget statement, executive’s budget proposal, enacted budget, citizens budget, in-year report, mid-year review, end-year report, audit report;
4. Comprehensively report on all public financial flows and institutions, including those that are managed outside of the formal budget process;
5. Include all resources used for the implementation of public, fiscal and economic policies, regardless of their origin, in their public budget documents and processes;
6. Ensure that legislatures and auditors are independent of government and have sufficient resources to increase their capacity and thus fulfill their oversight mandates effectively.
7. Publish and disseminate budget information in easy and accessible formats through all possible means, including digital open data formats through the internet, public libraries, information centers, etc.

Links updated 4 June 2018