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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:
- 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.
- To demystify economic
decision-making in general and budgets in particular by engaging in
economic literacy campaigns and creating awareness.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- The government - the President and his/her Cabinet who formulate the budget and other economic policies.
- Parliament, the legislative authority, which gives approval to the budget proposals submitted by the government.
- 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.
- 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.
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