Between April and June, the Transparent Cities program team held a series of workshops in cities across the country.
The “Control Budgets, Monitor Procurement” workshops took place in Kharkhiv, Dnipro, Odessa, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Kyiv, with the main target audiences including NGO and local government representatives as well as journalists. Students, Higher Ed, K-12, and government representatives comprised less than 5% of all attendants during the series of workshops, while a significant number of sociologists and attorneys attended.
Together with activists, journalists, and active citizens, the workshop participants talked about the local level budgeting process and practical tools for its control, as well as exploring public procurement monitoring tools.
In the Budgeting Process section, Mykola Orlov – the workshop trainer – and workshop participants focused on methods of budget monitoring as well as methods of engaging citizens in the budgeting process. Gender-oriented budgeting was also discussed, as were online and offline possibilities for community budget monitoring, and the role that the mass media plays in this process.
Elsewhere, in the Public Procurement Monitoring section, the first four workshops were held by Illia Rybakok, while the final workshop was held by Mykhailo Nevdakha. Both focused on risk analysis tools in public procurement, discussing the opportunities that the bi.prozorro.org system provides to activists and journalists, how to trace the movement of budget funds using spending.gov.ua, and various other key issues for those working with CSV files, dozorro.org, and search of connections – Google, Unified State Register, clarity-project.info, and youcontrol.com.ua.
The workshop participants immediately began to put their new knowledge into practice, completing practical exercises such as making an implementation plan for a local initiative from initial idea through to reality, creating an easy to understand budget layout, and monitoring their city’s purchases through dozorro.org, Unified State Register, and youcontrol.
The “Building Transparency in Ukrainian Cities” project is implemented with the support of the UN Democracy Fund.
