The top-performing in SSA was Ghana, which scored 56, while Nigeria scored equal points as Liberia, and Sierra Leone. It assesses the online availability, timeliness and comprehensiveness of eight key budget documents using 109 equally weighted indicators and scores each country on a scale of 0 to 100.Ī transparency score of 61 or above indicates that a country is likely publishing enough materials to support informed public debate on the budget.
The transparency part of the OBS measures public access to information on how the central government raises and spends public resources. Read also: Nigeria tops African CEOs’ export destinations – PAFTRAC Survey These indicators measure the public availability and comprehensiveness of the yearly budget documents, the role and effectiveness of the oversight institutions and opportunities for public participation in the budget process. Tolbet explained that the basis for the OBS is 145 score indicators based on international practices and standards. “But this is also supported and reinforced by civil society groups who have come together to ask for the data they need to understand how public funding is being prioritized and allocated and spent,” Tolbet told BusinessDay.Īll these efforts, she said started over a decade ago and have also been accompanied by others in state government, which, however, are not covered within the OBS methodology. “This improvement reflects ongoing efforts by the governments to improve the public availability of key documents on budget information,” Sally Tolbet, senior programme officer, International Budget Partnerships (IBP) who announced the outcomes of the survey in Abuja on Tuesday, said. “In this round of the open budget survey, we are excited to report that time, Nigeria is one of the top countries in the survey to improve on the OBS measure of budget transparency at the central government level. This 8th edition of the OBS covered 120 countries. It has three pillars, budget transparency, public participation and oversight, and is conducted every two years. The OBS is a tool for the government, civil society, and development partners to identify, discuss and prioritise actions to create advanced, open and accountable budgets. The performance is the second-highest improvement worldwide in transparency, second only to the Gambia.
The total transparency score of 45 in the 2021 survey, is a significant leap from the 21 scored in the 2019 survey. Nigeria posted its best performance in the OBS, improving by 24 points for transparency in the latest round. The ranking was carried out by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) through its Open Budget Survey (OBS), an independent and fact-based research instrument that uses internationally accepted criteria to regularly assess transparency, oversight and public participation in the national budgeting process, while also making comparative analysis. With a score of 45 percent, Nigeria has emerged as the second best in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in terms of budget transparency at the federal government level – though it ranked 65th position among 120 countries measured in 2021.
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