BudgIT Launches State Fiscal Transparency Initiative

BudgIT has launched its States Fiscal Transparency League (SFTL).

The SFTL initiative builds on the recently concluded World Bank’s State Fiscal Transparency, Accountability, and Sustainability (SFTAS) Program, which promoted fiscal transparency and facilitated accountability in public resource management.

The World Bank had developed SFTAS, a four-year program to support the government’s objective and encourage a common set of fiscal behavior aimed at fiscal transparency, accountability, and sustainability.

Based on this, BudgIT explained in a statement yesterday, that its States Fiscal Transparency League initiative was designed to sustain the gains of the World Bank’s SFTAS by tracking how well states maintain fiscal transparency, accountability, accessibility, and effective public finance management.

“The SFTL program is a quarterly assessment focused on various aspects, including Proposed Budget, Approved Budget, Citizens’ Budget, Budget Implementation Reports (BIR), Audit Report, eProcurement Portal, Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, Accountant General’s Report/Financial Statement and States’ Functional Website/Fiscal Repository.

“In line with the criteria above, we conducted an assessment of all 36 states in Nigeria for the first quarter of 2023. From our findings, nine states were progressive as they adhered to the SFTAS guidelines, 24 states performed averagely, while three states had poor performance,” the statement added.