The Ghana Aid Effectiveness Forum (GAEF), an umbrella body of national civil society networks, working on aid and development effectiveness issues, has launched its tracking report on the 2012 Budget.

The report entitled “Consolidating GAEF Gains in 2011, on Platforms Experience in Budget Analyses in the 2012 Budget,” highlights the experience of the Forum in holding the Government accountable for its revenue and expenditure outlays in the 2012 fiscal year.

A statement issued in Accra on Thursday, and copied to Ghana News Agency said the report also highlighted the successes chalked out, lessons learnt, key initiatives taken, and challenges encountered by the Forum in the 2012 budget analysis.

It said the interest in budget analyses among Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) had soared significantly and that there are on-going initiatives to trickle down knowledge and understanding of budget proposals to the districts.

“This is to encourage grass root participation in budget advocacy. However, the efforts made by GAEF in holding the government accountable for its fiscal activities were constrained by the limited access to information.”

The Forum noted the inability of state functionaries to provide budgetary data for effective monitoring of government’s expenditure by CSOs.

It said the websites of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) lacked the needed sectoral budgetary and expenditure information.

The statement said the unwillingness of public officials to release available data and lack of access to classified budgetary information thwarted the efforts of the Forum as researchers were denied access to them.

“Data made accessible to the Forum was also untimely to enable effective budget tracking.”

According to the statement the challenges faced in the budget tracking exercise in the 2012 fiscal year spoke volumes of the national need for the passing of the Right to Information bill into law.

“Ghana can only achieve true democracy when citizens have access to the right information at the right time to enable informed and participatory governance.”

The Forum welcomes the Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI) but admonished that the data should be updated regularly and timely to enhance its usefulness.

It said GODI is a national platform for organising and disseminating data, and should be possible to interface information management systems of the MDAs.

It should serve as a hub for secondary data on Ghana, detailing micro level information on all sectors of the economy.

The Forum recommended that budgetary data on specific sectors should be centralised under a unit within each Ministry.

GAEF) is made up of 15 platforms representing thematic areas such as agriculture, local production and labour, gender, Millennium Development Goals, monitoring and evaluation and health.

Others include youth, environment, education, water and sanitation, oil and gas and right to information, as well as poverty reduction, governance and Civil Society Organizations’ accountability.

The Secretariat of the Forum is hosted by SEND-GHANA, a non-governmental organisation.