Budget transparency in Uganda

This report analyses the budgetary process in Uganda, in an attempt to determine the level of transparency, and to identify major weaknesses. It examines the drafting, legislative, implementation, and audit and evaluation phases of the budget process and explores the role of civil society and donor funding in ensuring transparency. It uses descriptive analysis based on a review of relevant existing and past budget and legislative documents, and interviews with various policymakers and implementers in the budget process.

Impediments to budget transparency identified by the report include that:

• although civil society and the donor community have played various roles in the budget process, ranging from participating in sector working groups, monitoring, providing advisory services, and reporting, their role is not specified in the legislation
• budget information is not available in common languages and at affordable costs
• state agencies set up for the purposes of monitoring budgets and the effects of government policy, such as the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics, have limited autonomy
• revenues are low, partly due to the small size of the tax base and high administrative costs, but also due to political manoeuvres; this leads to a high degree of dependence on donor budget financing
• Ugandan civil society lacks the skills and capacity to participate in budget analysis, and the tendency of civil society organisations to limit their coverage to particular sectors or geographical regions waters down their potential for lobbying and advocacy.

In order to address these problems, the report recommends that:

• the government should adopt Zero Based Budgeting, a system of continuously reviewing departments to identify wasteful schemes and surplus staff such that resources can be used more effectively
• for community-based participatory budget analysis to be effective, it is necessary first to create a public database of relevant information about the budget, and for those who are supposed to participate to acquire the needed analytical skills
• increased transparency, participation and accountability could enhance revenue collections as taxpayers became partners in the budget process
• the determination of spending ceilings for the different levels of government needs to be made more transparent
• the government should provide a summary or popular version of the budget which would be easier and cheaper to translate into common languages and to disseminate.