For some years now, the Rwandan government, through the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, has disseminated the Citizen Budget Guidebook, an annual tool designed to help citizens closely follow implementation of the national budget.

The idea is to promote transparency and accountability in budget execution and to ensure that the taxpayer interacts with the entire budget cycle.

Citizen budgets are written in concise and easy-to-understand language with a view to furnish ordinary citizens with information they need to ably interrogate and make sense of the budget process and priorities for which public funds have been allocated.

Today, the Ministry of Finance prints about 20,000 copies of Citizen Budget Guidebook, each of them 24 pages. Each of the nearly 15,000 villages is supposed to receive a copy, while copies are also sent to other local administrative entities, schools, among others.

However, while there has been some improvement in citizen participation in the budgetary processes (at 60 per cent), especially during the formulation phase, there is a need for greater efforts toward ensuring that citizens make it a culture to demand more from their leaders during the implementation phase.

Citizens are the primary source and ultimate beneficiaries of national budgets and, therefore, should not only be familiar with the whole budgeting process but must also be in position to inform and influence budget priorities.

Furthermore, by closely following budget execution, they are able to identify emerging gaps and challenges which would inform their inputs for the next budget.

As such, the Citizen Budget Guidebook is a critical tool that would go a long way toward making the executive deliver on its budget commitments on time, and help ensure value for money.

This is why the Guidebook – which is written in Kinyarwanda, English and French – should be easily accessible to all citizens at the grassroots.

Copies should not just gather dust in the village ‘gitifu’ office, but rather any citizen should be in position to access them during the course of the fiscal year. In addition, the documents should be presented and discussed during community meetings, including Umuganda, Umugoroba w’Ababyeyi, among others.

But for this to happen there is a need for closer follow-up and coordination between particularly the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, and that of Local Government.