Budget tracking

Budget analysis and tracking can help make education more accountable - and narrow the frighteningly large gap between governments and their citizens. This in turn improves governance and deepens democratisation. This is a relatively new area of work for ActionAid in education.

The first steps often involve national-level work - for example, producing a simplified guide to how the government's education budget is supposed to work. Budgets are then tracked in different projects across the country, to ascertain what happens to the budget in practice.

We determine whether there is equity across different areas, by analysing, for example:

• who makes decisions about the budget at each level
• whether there is transparency
• whether the money is reaching the different levels as it should
• the net amount arriving in each school per-capita

Tracking all resources
It can be important to match the tracking of government budgets with the tracking of all other resources coming into the system (eg from donors or parents). In Kenya a national coalition of organisations concerned with education, the Elimu Yetu coalition, was alarmed to find parental contributions to their local school often got sucked out of the school to prop up district education offices and support services. Specifically tracking costs charged to parents can be an important factor in getting people to campaign on education.

Ensuring a balance in spending
Budget tracking can help ensure that investment in primary education is not at the expense of secondary education, and help root out budgetary discrimination against women's education, by highlighting issues such as subsidies to boys-only private schools, spending on science labs but not on toilet facilities and excessive spending on universities when most university students are male.

Budget tracking through reflect
There is a growing area of work around budget analysis and economic literacy within Reflect programmes, providing a potential basis for budget tracking work in education. Communication and Power, the Reflect resource materials, provide a range of practical approaches that are used in this work.

photo : ©Jenny Matthews/ Network/ ActionAid