Freedom of Information Center of Armenia.

Transparent budget-a strong and growing community. Citizens participate in community budget management

Public Awareness and Monitoring Center NGO is implementing “Community Budget Control through Dialogue” sub-grant project which is co-funded by European Union. It is implemented within the framework of “Informed Armenia” project of Freedom of Information Center, in cooperation with the European Journalism Center.

The project is aimed at monitoring the environmental costs of community budgets and assessing their effectiveness. For this purpose, the CRPM is conducting research in the towns of Alaverdi, Akhtala and Spitak of Lori province.

The project aims to raise public awareness, promote transparency and accountability in community budgeting and implementation through the introduction of public monitoring and oversight mechanisms, create a platform for dialogue between civil society, the public, state and local government.

Project manager, coordinator Marie Chakryan mentioned that they want to show what environmental issues local communities have and how much money they have to eliminate and prevent those problems.
"It is also important for us to raise public awareness and encourage people to participate as actively as possible in the discussion of community budgeting and further oversight," she said.

An emergency council meeting is convened in communities every three months, which also presents a quarterly report on budget execution, which is open to the public.
"However, as we can see, the public is not interested, does not believe that something can change, its proposal can be taken into account, and we want to try to break that stereotype. We are also developing an online tool for citizens to access the platform, see the budget directions of their community, the issues, and at their discretion indicate which issue they consider to be a priority and what part of the budget they would allocate, ”Mari Chakryan added.

The project runs awareness campaigns in Alaverdi, Akhtala, Spitak communities, where the community representative represents the community budget, and they present the tools by which public is informed how they can participate in their community, in particular, in budget management.

Here is the video about the project.