by Oluseun Onigbinde

For BudgIT’s work to scale, our work must impact both citizens and government in a way that they see “data” as an opportunity to enhance better service delivery towards national development. From the citizens’ end, we hope that soon, out of their own self-enlightened interest, citizens will start using data to hold their governments to account, demanding action for institutional efficiency. We also see the government incubating our ideas and using a wide public channel or media to influence civic behaviour towards accountability.

For example, we would like the Nigerian government to expand its monitoring and evaluation unit to track public projects and also include citizen-generated comments, complementing the work that our Tracka platform does. By doing so, the job of accountability runs naturally, coming from both sides, with both parties supporting themselves while the civil society just plays a monitoring role.
Our recent reflection document looks at how BudgIT and other civic actors can plug into these opportunities for accountability. We do this by showing how, if BudgIT continues its dedicated work in partnership with these fledging accountability ideas, it will illuminate the changes in Nigeria’s civic space in the next few years.

Kindly download the document here.