EYES ON THE BUDGET, EYEMARK ON THE PROJECT
Stephanie Orji
It is elemental to note that part of active citizenship is monitoring and evaluation of the Government budget.
“Active citizenship involves citizens having control over their daily lives as users of public services, allowing them to influence decisions, voice concerns, and engage with service provision. This includes both choice and voice, enabling citizens to impact service provision by participating in local policies, interacting with institutions, and expressing preferences. It encompasses activities in politics, workplaces, civil society, and private spheres. …”1
Budget monitoring and evaluation is a way of observing the budget activities in order to determine their effectiveness or ineffectiveness, or their success or failure.
On 25th of September, 2024, the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning organized a – ‘Sensitization Workshop on Leveraging and Adopting the Use of Geographic Information System (GIS) Technology for Planning and Monitoring and Evaluation’
Proactive Gender Initiatives was among the Non-Governmental Organizations that were invited. From the sensitization I picked up in basics that GIS is the capturing, management and use of information or data connected to a location.
We were made abreast of the latest activities of that Ministry and how they have leveraged technology to monitor the performance of other Ministries and Agencies of Government. They recently developed an app and have launched it on Google Play, citizens and others concerned can utilize the app to monitor, confirm or report on the implementation or performance of activities or tangible projects on the Federal Budget. The name of this app is Eyemark.
On Eyemark, one can search for projects under different categories such as – Sectors, Ministries, and States. One could also search for projects using parameters such as – year, special projects, major roads, health, schools, etc. A user of the app, who is at the location of that project, should be able to write a review on the progress of that project. That review could be that there is no such project there, or that the project has been abandoned, or that the progress is good or not good.
We were told at the workshop that the app first confirms your location, to make sure that you are at the location of the project you would want to report on, to avoid a situation where one would want to report on a project they did not confirm with any of their senses. We were also told that you could be a registered user of the app or a non-registered user. Weeks later, from the comfort of my location, I tried to write a review for a project I clicked on, I could not, neither could I Eyemark it, this was perhaps because I was not anywhere near the project, or that I did not register (I don’t know, maybe).
At the workshop, terminologies such as geospatial data, satellite imagery, etc. were used, it made me think of NIGCOMSAT. It was a beautiful event.
Thank you.
Stephanie Orji lawyers at Heptagon & Associates, a full service law firm in Abuja, Nigeria.
23-October-2024.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_citizenship accessed on 23rd October, 2024. ↩︎