A public budget must have two major components – Revenue and Expenditure. These two components focus on revenue generation – how the funds are gotten, and expenditure – how the funds are spent. The federal government set up Treasury Single Account TSA to improve and increase revenue generation and cash management. The TSA system helps consolidate government cash balances, gives the finance/treasury oversight of all government cash flows, and improves budget control and monitoring. In line with the Open Government Partnership, the Nigerian government developed an open treasury portal to increase government transparency and provide ample space for collating government spending data at the federal level and for federal MDAs.

BudgIT observed gaps in the government portal, such as the total amount made in a month, multiple payments, payments to individual accounts, omitted accounts, and payments made to contracts. In light of this, BudgIT developed the GovSpend website (the data are mined from the Open Treasury portal) to bridge these loopholes, and so far, it has recorded tremendous success. BudgIT developed the website to enable researchers, citizens, journalists, and the CSOs, to analyse the data of government spending as seen from the treasury,

BudgIT has trained over 30 journalists, particularly investigative journalists specialising in capital project monitoring, to use the portal. It also plans to have a fellowship for journalists who would use the portal to access information on payments made to contractors and link it to projects seen at the sites. So far, BudgIT has analysed the data available on the GovSpend portal for citizens’ engagements.