KABUL (SW): The Integrity Watch launched the ‘Open Budget Survey 2017 of Afghanistan’ with the presence of officials from the Ministry of Finance, Supreme Audit Office and Budget Commission of the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) as well as civil society, academia and the press in Kabul on Sunday.
According to the results of the Open Budget Survey 2017 (OBS), conducted by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) and Integrity Watch Afghanistan, the Afghan government has secured only 15 points out of a total of 100 points. Expressing concerns over minimal participation of public in budget drafting in Afghanistan, Syed Ikrami Afzali, head of the IWA, said Afghanistan secured 27 points in the previous OBS in 2015.
He said issues related to creating mechanisms for publication participation in the budget process such as participatory budgeting, provincial budgeting and social audit remain in many countries including Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has been in the OBS since 2008, and the 2017 survey finds that it has improved in terms of its ranking on the Open Budget Index, or OBI, which uses internationally recognized criteria to give each country a transparency score on a 100-point scale. Afghanistan OBI score increased from 42 in 2015 to 49 in 2017, making it easier for citizens to get information about what is being done with public money and to hold the government to account.
Mohammad Khalid Painda, deputy minister at the Ministry of Finance, told the moot in this connection that the government would pay due attention to the issue of public participation in drafting budget in the future. He also underlined the importance of formulated budget for proivnces.
Launched in 2006, the OBS is the world’s only independent, comparative assessment of the three pillars of public budget accountability: transparency, oversight and public participation. The sixth round of this biennial assessment, the 2017 survey evaluated 115 countries across six continents, adding 13 new countries to the survey since the last round in 2015.
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