Submitted by crinadmin on
Summary: This paper examines the increasing use of
budget analysis as a tool for rights based
programming.
Until recently the Government Budget was a difficult to access and difficult
to understand instrument. This is however changing, and as a tool for
rights based programming budget analysis is increasingly used. Over the
last 10 years, budget monitoring and analysis has grown enormously in
popularity as a tool for holding government to account at all levels – from
the national to the grassroots. Equally, budget monitoring can be a tool for
monitoring the activities of donors – holding them to commitments or
exposing gaps between their advice or conditionalities and their own
practice. International Monetary Fund and World Bank initiatives such as
the high profile Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and the debt-
focused Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, with their
promises of additional funding for poverty reduction have helped spark
interest in budget monitoring. Similarly, the move to political and financial
decentralisation in many countries and the strength of pro-democracy and
accountability movements have also focused attention on budgets.
pdf: www.crin.org/docs/resources/publications/hrbap/Wheresthemoney.pdf