CAIRO: With Egypt's presidential elections coming up in September, the National Democratic Party has said that the role of the government is to “stand by the poor and impoverished,” as President Hosni Mubarak said in his most recent speech. A new “citizen's budget” released this week by the Ministry of Finance is the government's attempt at allowing for more transparency and informing the public about how the national budget achieves their stated goals. “The budget will outline, in simplified form, what exactly the government spends on public goods like health, education, and youth and sports, and will allow citizens to suggest projects that should be of priority, empowering citizens and giving them a more important role in the policy process,” the budget statement reads. The citizen's budget was prepared using the national budget as well as budgets for specific governorates. Omneia Helmy, deputy director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, lauded the move as a “good step for allowing citizens to be more active in their respective governorates by being a part of the policy process.” She added that this would allow citizens to better understand how government money is being spent. According to Helmy, citizen's are supposed to become more aware about the spending on issues that are important to them like health and education, and being informed allows them to take interest and increase their political participation as well as perform their civic duties. The citizen's budget outlined health spending at 5 percent of national expenditure, education at 12 percent and social security spending at 26 percent. According to the budget document, these figures constitute a 24 percent increase in health spending and a 6 percent increase in education spending. Comparing the citizen's budget to those of other countries, the Ministry of Finance's effort includes all the commonly covered topics: a simplified explanation of the budget, how it is prepared and approved, where the money comes from and where it goes in terms of expenditure and revenue, and an explanation of the budget deficit as well as the importance of fiscal discipline. The document however did not include a section on how the budget process is monitored and supervised. In Helmy's view, the citizen's budget may be a step towards the decentralization strategy currently adopted by the government. Transparency on this level gives more responsibility and, in turn, authority to each governorate to make budgetary decisions. Khaled Amin, associate professor for public policy and administration at Cairo University, said that while the public document is a first step, it is still a long way from the participatory budgeting the finance ministry is targeting. “This budget is a very good starting point as this is the first time for the government to summarize its budget, which is usually 1,000 pages long, and simplify it so that ordinary people can understand,” he said. “There should however be more simplifications, as the tables are still complicated and the line items have to be broken down further to increase transparency. This makes it less friendly than citizen's budgets prepared by other governments,” he added. In terms of the public's participation, Amin said that he still sees no realistic way for the government to get feedback from citizens, no interactive channel for them to go through. “The Ministry of Finance has proposed that citizens use Members of Parliament as a channel to reach the government with their suggestions, but some of the parliamentarians are not capable enough to deal with budgetary issues or are just not interested,” he said. “To reach real and not artificial change, we need interaction between citizens and the Ministry of Finance, maybe through NGOs,” he added. “Although this move can be considered an example of increased transparency and more accessible dissemination of information, this is just the first step and the government needs to do more,” he concluded.
