News

2007 National Budget and Highlights

Report of 2006 Budget Analysis (Open Letter to the President)

DEEP Model Project

2005 National Budget

2005 Budget Highlights

Post-Budget Statement - 2005

Public Fora on 2005 National Budget

UNDP Pours Cold Water on IMF Ideologies!

Budget Practioners Training of Trainers Workshop

Papers

Social Accountability and Poverty Reduction

Manual on the Budget Process in Ghana

Financing Decentralised Development

Revised Ghana Report of EPIAM Study

Multidonor Budget Support

Budgeting and Accounting Structures of District Assemblies

The Centre for Budget Advocacy (CBA) was established to support civil society organizations to appreciate and improve their understanding of and engage with the public budgets and the budgeting process as a means of claiming rights for and by the poor and promoting "good governance" and democracy.

The Centre for Budget Advocacy (CBA) is not only involved in advocacy on budgets at all levels but also involved in research in pertinent issues that relate to budgets. Like many other budget advocacy groups, we view the budget as a very important policy tool because:

• The nation's resources are generated and allocated through the budget;
• The budget states the amount of public resources needed for and how government (national or local) plans to generate them for public expenditures; and
• The budget impacts the lives of virtually everybody in society differently, depending on how resources are allocated.

So everybody should be interested in the budget and try to influence its outcome but this has not been the situation and most people, especially the poor and marginalized, are not adequately catered for, because:

• There is too much pressure for limited resources;
• There is lack of consultation/participation in allocation of resources;
• There is lack of accountability to the people (principal/agent principle);
• There is ignorance and/or even disinterest in the budget process.

Objectives:
The main objectives of the CBA include the following:

1. To spread the understanding of the budget process in Ghana and empower the citizens to begin to engage the budget process at both the national and local authority level.
2. To demystify economic decision-making in general and budgets in particular by engaging in economic literacy campaigns and creating awareness.
3. To study and use alternative budget and planning models for analysing budgets and development policies with a view to contributing to better outcomes and a better life for all.
4. To collaborate with other partners in carrying out relevant research and to disseminate such research findings and other budget information to all stakeholders and the public to achieve our goals.
5. To gradually extend our efforts to West Africa and Africa at large and collaborate with organizations working in similar areas in sister countries.

Target Audience:
The Centre of Budget Advocacy (CBA) targets:

1. The government - the President and his/her Cabinet who formulate the budget and other economic policies.
2. Parliament, the legislative authority, which gives approval to the budget proposals submitted by the government.
3. Civil society, especially organised groups, by creating awareness as well as interests in budgets so as to encourage them to engage decision-makers on budgets.
4. The International Financial Institutions and other donors and creditors who, as part of their development assistance, tend to play a very important role in determining the type of economic policies we put in place.

Although the CBA has successfully executed most of the programmes planned for the first phase of ISODEC's Rights-based Advocacy Programme (RBA I), most of them are recurring activities and there is the need to continue others, including its economic literacy and budget advocacy work as well as undertaking actual tracking of public expenditure, especially those targeting poverty reduction. These programmes have been included in ISODEC's second phase of the Rights-based Advocacy Programme (RBA II). The CBA will, therefore, continue its Press Conferences on the budget and other policy pronouncements by government, its regional public forums on the budget, its analysis of the annual budgets and its budget training workshops for civil society and public officials at the Assembly level. Other specific activities that the CBA plans to undertake during the next three years include:

• Convene an international conference entitled: "Breaking the Recessionary Trap. Alternative Macroeconomics in Africa" to discuss policy alternatives for poor and developing African countries.
• Convene a roundtable of experts to exchange and promote skills on tools for alternative policy analysis in Africa.
• Complete and launch the DEEP model.
• Develop a training initiative in collaboration with the Universities in Ghana to propagate tools for quantitative analysis.
• Undertake a study on the effects of the HIPC debt relief initiative and other policies on equity and poverty reduction in Ghana.
• Actual tracking of public expenditure, particularly central government transfers and poverty related expenditures.
• Conclude and publish the study on the impact of trade policy on Rice and Cotton production in Ghana.

Finally, the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC) has plans to grow the Centre for Budget Advocacy into an autonomous Budget Training, Advocacy and Research Institute to undertake serious civil society capacity building, development of analytical tools for budget and poverty analysis, and research work in the West African sub-region.