Video: "Your Voice, Your Opportunity" Indonesia Campaign Raises Budget Awareness
This spring, Revenue Watch's Indonesian partner, PATTIRO, together with a Columbia University researcher and NGO LPAW, conducted an innovative grassroots campaign to raise awareness about government management of public finances at the local level. The "Your Voice, Your Opportunity" project, which reached 93 villages and nearly 2,000 people in Indonesia's Blora district, and helped participants write district leaders, highlighted the lack of transparency and access to government budgeting information citizens in resource-rich developing countries often face.
A video filmed and edited by Nanang Sujana and produced by Revenue Watch Southeast Asia Regional Coordinator Chandra Kirana captures this outreach project in process, as one organizer, Teguh Budi Setiawan, performs outreach to local farmers.
Your Voice, Your Opportunity from Nanang Sujana on Vimeo.
Most locals in Blora, the poorest district in Central Java, do not understand the district leaders' budget, nor how it relates to their daily life, explains Setiawan. But through an interactive budgeting exercise, participants compared their priorities for resource revenues derived from their region's oil and gas resources with actual government expenditures, and came to realize they don't have enough information on how resource revenues are spent.
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