Blog from Uganda

We sat under the biggest mango tree I have ever seen, a beast of a tree reaching as wide as a house and as tall as the sky. There, local Uganda citizens and local public officials gathered to explain to us -- a group from all over the world -- how citizens in Uganda are knee-deep in overseeing how their government spends their money.

I am here in Uganda this week for a gathering of an international project that I helped start three years ago, the Civil Society Budget Initiative. We support groups in Africa, Latin America and Asia to study and advocate on their governments' public spending policies, with an eye to making budgets miore directly responsible to the needs of the poorest. People have come here from Malawi. Ethiopia, Guatemala, Bolivia, Indonesia, Burkina Faso and elsewhere.

Uganda is a model of sorts, a place famous for its local citizen budget monitoring. Parents take note of how many teachers are really in the schools, how many books children have, and similar counts of things on the ground. The Uganda Debt Network helps them compare those realities with what it says on paper they are supposed to have. Public officials, our friends here noted, sometimes get confused between "their own money and public money." Here citizens don't have much tolerance for such confusion and local budget monitoring is a real instrument in the fight against corruption.

In the meeting we attended, hot and humid here on the equator, the central topic of conversation was that the teachers at the local rural school weren't showing up. The problem was that local officials hadn't dealt with the falling-apart rooms in which the teachers were expected to live. After the meeting, fixing the rooms was made a priority. I have heard the same issue in Bolivia, a chronic problem in getting rural teachers to come and to stay.

All over the world a citizen movement is underway to make public budgets -- that great mystery of numbers and complexity -- something understood by real people. It is after all -- from California to Uganda -- the main instrument by which the government will decide everything from the kind of education that our kids will have to the way in which we will address the basic needs of the poor.

For more infiormation on budget work, including some of The Democracy Center's publications on this topic, visit here.