[okfn-discuss] Allocation Alerts

[Oladipo Fasoro]

Hello there,

The team at MacGrenor mused upon the idea of TechForChange, an Idea birthed
to take advantage of the technological inclination of the Change message of
the new Nigerian Federal Administration.

TechForChange intends to position as a vehicle to rapidly prototype
innovative ideas while also acting as a viable partner to Government in
pushing for open data, open standards and open source. TechForChange seeks
to rapidly prototype and test varying technology based ideas in how People
interact with Government and Government Services.

While we have lot's of ideas in the pipeline, one idea we decided to
quickly prototype is the idea of the allocation alerts. The Federal
Government (almost) every month produces a pdf of how much money it
disburses to all units of government. This is fundamentally different from
budgets or even procurement listings. This is a detailed listing of the
amounts paid out specifically to each unit as at when it is paid out.

AllocationAlerts ( http://allocations.techforchange.org.ng/ ) is a
transparency tool that seeks to help people be more aware of the flow of
money to the units of government that directly concern them. For example,
my local government or a particular agency in charge of a particular
project in my area. Or if I am a federal contractor, I might be interested
in when and what amounts are paid in to the Client Agency.

This is not an accountability tool as the initial project scope is not to
TRACK what the amounts are being used for but basically to improve the
awareness of Citizens about the monies being disbursed for the units of
government that directly concern then as against being fixated on the
central government.

The tool allows you to subscribe with your email address to units of
interest, the subscriber automatically gets monthly notifications just like
Bank Credit alerts. This specificity in information sharing and
transparency gives room for more targeted and effective advocacy and
transparency.

As at now, we have digitized and structured into a database some amounts of
historical information by transforming pdfs from the website of the Account
General of the Federation: http://oagf.gov.ng , the data at best contains
bulk disbursement to the federal level, bulk disbursements to states, and
also to local government.

We are already talking with key players in the new administration to work
with the Ministry of Finance to retrieve the breakdown of allocations to
each and every Federal Ministry, Department and Agency every month. We are
also talking to Kaduna State, a state newly headed by arguably the most IT
savvy Governor in Nigeria to see how we can work together at State levels
to target State Agencies.

You can please take a look at and share your thoughts.
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