Kanifing Municipal Council Begins Training on Participatory Budgeting

The Kanifing Municipal Council is partnering with the International Republican Institute (IRI) to pilot a participatory budgeting (PB) project for the Council.

Since PB empowers citizens to participate in decision-making and improves citizen perception of local government, the Council is intending to improve on the PB exercise it conducted 2 years ago.

As a result, the International Republican Institute (IRI) through its partner, ‘People Powered’ will develop a PB roadmap that will include a review of available participatory budgeting platforms, best practices and lessons learned from a variety of contexts.

The objectives of this pilot Project are:

1: To improve municipal officials’ awareness and use of available tools and practices that can facilitate the process of participatory budgeting.

2: To increase the public’s understanding of participatory budgeting and citizen engagement in fiscal decision-making through the use of locally implemented participatory budgeting processes.

To kick-start the process a training was conducted on Tuesday 8th March, 2022 at the IRI Centre in Bijilo for the Council Management and Councillors.

The Council hopes that once the roadmap is concluded, Kanifing Municipal Council will stand in a better position to successfully implement an inclusive PB process for the residents of KM.