Hello there, The team at MacGrenor mused upon the idea of TechForChange, an Idea birthed to take advantage of the technological inclination of the Change message of the new Nigerian Federal Administration.
TechForChange intends to position as a vehicle to rapidly prototype innovative ideas while also acting as a viable partner to Government in pushing for open data, open standards and open source. TechForChange seeks to rapidly prototype and test varying technology based ideas in how People interact with Government and Government Services. While we have lot's of ideas in the pipeline, one idea we decided to quickly prototype is the idea of the allocation alerts. The Federal Government (almost) every month produces a pdf of how much money it disburses to all units of government. This is fundamentally different from budgets or even procurement listings. This is a detailed listing of the amounts paid out specifically to each unit as at when it is paid out. AllocationAlerts ( http://allocations.techforchange.org.ng/ ) is a transparency tool that seeks to help people be more aware of the flow of money to the units of government that directly concern them. For example, my local government or a particular agency in charge of a particular project in my area. Or if I am a federal contractor, I might be interested in when and what amounts are paid in to the Client Agency. This is not an accountability tool as the initial project scope is not to TRACK what the amounts are being used for but basically to improve the awareness of Citizens about the monies being disbursed for the units of government that directly concern then as against being fixated on the central government. The tool allows you to subscribe with your email address to units of interest, the subscriber automatically gets monthly notifications just like Bank Credit alerts. This specificity in information sharing and transparency gives room for more targeted and effective advocacy and transparency. As at now, we have digitized and structured into a database some amounts of historical information by transforming pdfs from the website of the Account General of the Federation: http://oagf.gov.ng , the data at best contains bulk disbursement to the federal level, bulk disbursements to states, and also to local government. We are already talking with key players in the new administration to work with the Ministry of Finance to retrieve the breakdown of allocations to each and every Federal Ministry, Department and Agency every month. We are also talking to Kaduna State, a state newly headed by arguably the most IT savvy Governor in Nigeria to see how we can work together at State levels to target State Agencies. You can please take a look at and share your thoughts.
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