Freedom of Information Center of Armenia.

Public oversight of funds spent on road construction projects

Every citizen has the right to know how much money the state allocates to improve each sector. State loan funds provided for road-building purposes are not an exclusion. Is Armenian citizen aware enough today and how much information is available for him? Freedom of Information Center together with National Road Safety Council NGO (NRSC) implement "Issues of publicity and public control of road construction programs" subgrant project, which is co-funded by the European Union.

In the framework of this subgrant project, NRSC has proposed to develop and introduce a finalized data form to ensure the publicity of the road construction costs, which will enable the citizens to have "real" publicity and broaden the oversight and anti-corruption functions through publicly accessible information.

National Road Safety Council has started to study the information available on the official websites of the RA Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies, as well as the "Transportation Projects Implementation Organization" SNCO.

"This is a project that has always been of interest to people and has been in the focus of attention as the safety of roads is very important. Studies have shown that there is a lot of information on budget spending on the websites that are difficult to understand and can be misleading. It is not possible to get comparable information in official format, as only those who comprehend it can understand it. So it can be concluded that it will be difficult for citizens to get informed ", says project coordinator Lilit Galstyan.

From 2018 the existing abuse of the "North-South Road Corridor" project still remains in the center of attention of the public in 2018. Today everyone is interested in the course of implementation of the road program, the quality of roads being constructed and, most importantly, the means spent on it.

The goal of this sub-grant project is the publicity and public oversight of funds spent on road construction projects (state budget and credit allocations) in the RA, which can greatly contribute to the increase of the efficiency of these funds.
 

Here is the video about the project.