The public needs access to the budgets of cities and districts

The level of awareness of the public, including non-governmental organizations in the regions of formation of budgets of cities and regions and directions of their extremely low. Moreover, the population is almost not involved participation in the budget process. This was noted on December 7 in Baku round-table discussions of the results of the project "School Budget", realized in Baku, Ganja, Lankaran and Sheki.

Project Coordinator Ghalib Abbaszadeh said that the purpose of the project was to increase public knowledge about the components of the state budget, citizen participation in the budget process, the establishment of business relations between civil society and government, and thus strengthen the struggle against manifestations of corruption. Trainings were conducted mainly for NGOs in the regions that cooperate with the organization Transparency-Azerbaijan. A survey of these NGOs and other stakeholders (media, public sector), showed that most respondents were not aware of the basic budgetary issues at the regional level. For example, only 29% of the 80 participants of the "School Budget" know that in the state budget fixes only one information about the city and district budgets (absolute amount of expenditure).

The "School Budget" was implemented by a coalition of NGOs, "National Budget Group" and was funded by the U.S. State Department.

The share of the budgets of cities and regions in 2012 had 2.9% of the state budget. In 2013, this figure could reach 3.6%. Only 39% of local budget revenues are generated from local sources. The remaining costs are subsidized by transfers from the state budget. - 08D-