The need to bring the local government expenditure under the spotlight became more necessary at the passage of the local government’s autonomy bill by the 8th assembly. As of 2018, the bill had been passed in 9 states across the country.

At Civic Hive, we partnered with EiE ( enough is enough) to advocate for an open government at the local level. While speaking with local government workers in Ebonyi and Zamfara states, we realised that many planning officers do not know how much funds each local government they represent receives. This further established our thesis for creating a USSD platform that helps to give direct information to citizens on the funds received from the FAAC account.

The LG alert gives citizens direct access to information from the federation account. To use the LG alert platform, a short message coded (civichive 2020, kwali) needs to be sent from an MTN mobile carrier to 34461, giving you detailed information about the funds received by the Local Government.

Launched in 2019, we have recorded over 500,000 users across the country on the platform.

The recent stop in providing FAAC data caused a temporary setback to the platform and debarred citizens from getting new information towards the funds received from the FAAC. However, the advocacy visit by BudgIT to the office of the statistician general of the federation led to the release of the backlog of the Federal Allocation account disbursement.

To further widen the net of the states that have signed up on the local government autonomy bill, the Senate passed the LG financial administrative autonomy on March 1 2022. This mandates that all state governments abolish the joint allocation account of their state and create a Local Government Allocation Account into which all the allocations will be paid. If this law is well implemented, it makes tracking LG funds easy for civil society organisations.