The Jigawa state government in collaboration with the Exceptional Leadership and Integrity Promotion Initiative (ELIP) on Friday, concluded citizen’s engagement in preparation for the state’s 2025 budget and got over 5,000 inputs from the citizens.
ELIP is a civil society organisation working on financial management, community development and inclusion. Executive Director of ELIP, Isah Mustapha said the meeting targets one community-based organisation in each of the 287 political wards in the state. He stated that during the engagement, civil society organisations in the state made their inputs to the 2025 budget preparation for the state.
Mr Mustapha said that apart from the respondents from the town hall meeting, over 5,000 respondents filled Google forms, spotlighted their communities’ needs which they want the government to implement in the 2025 budget.
“This year, we conducted the town hall meeting at three senatorial zones selecting one community-based organisation from each of the 287 political wards, and through online, where we received over 5,000 inputs from citizens” Mr Mustapha stated.
“The reason is to ensure that the community’s needs and priorities are reflected in the state’s annual budget. The meeting tries to ensure changes in resource prioritisation and programming in the state.
“Based on our annual appraisal of government policies and programmes, we learnt that if the state continues with the routine annual budgeting system, we will not achieve our target and objectives.
“In Jigawa state, nobody is happy with the development indices. Based on this, the meeting aimed to achieve two key objectives – to sensitise the community-based organisations and other relevant parties about prioritisation of needs and to harvest their inputs to be reflected in the annual budget”, Mr Mustapha said.
He said that ELIP would carry out an analysis of the inputs and submit report to the government for consideration.
“The initiative aims to achieve a budget that would reflect community needs and aspirations by solving the community’s problems and changing the community’s status in terms of human capital development indices. We don’t want the business to be as usual; we want to achieve the unusual and have a paradigm shift from the status quo”, Mr Mustapha said.
The Permanent Secretary, the state Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Muhammad Yusha’u, said the town hall meeting aimed to gather inputs from key stakeholders in the three senatorial districts of the state.
“The meeting aimed to get citizens priority in the state budget to make it a people’s budget not an office prepared document” he stated.
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