Summary of project results
The project targeted the need to raise accountability in public funds’ administration. The project’s objective was to operationalize the principles of transparency, public participation, and efficiency in order to increase the correlation between the actual impact of public spending and the development needs of the community. The targeted and achieved results of the project envisaged the development of a mechanism for identifying the actual needs of the community, the initiation of a transparent budgeting process, and the testing of a pilot mechanism for the control of public spending, through community integrity building, in one of Bucharest’s sectors (Sector 6). The project used and developed an existing platform –
www.banipierduti.ro, which became
www.banipublici.ro - and the expertise of the partners, and it developed and tested innovative tools for this purpose: a budgeting simulator, budgetary atlases for each county (41 county atlases and 1 atlas for District 6), data visualization tools, budgetary databases, a public spending monitoring mechanism etc. Data collection was a continuous and lengthy process, and it was made throughout the entire period of project’s implementation. Data has been collected from the websites of the County Councils, and where this was not possible, public information requests have been sent, with repeated returns for clarifications. The data thus obtained was centralized and transferred into an open format, for an efficient and systematic integration in the database that was used in the development of the online component. The intended and achieved number of beneficiaries was 5,000 citizens directly engaged in the project’s activities; 42 local public administrations directly targeted for increasing accountability in applying the public finance legislation; 30 participants in the community integrity building process; over 500.000 citizens and stakeholders informed about the budgetary policy.