All Media Group - Local Government Budgets and Local Media

About this grant

As South Africa enters its second decade of democracy, the responsibility for service delivery at the local level rests with local government. Therefore, budgetary processes at the local level are critical to ensuring that community priorities receive the necessary budget allocations. The local media can play a major role in encouraging community participation in budgetary processes.Funding will enable the Budget Information Service of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa to train representatives of the local media and community organizations to develop media articles and reports on local budgets; help target groups to collect and analyze municipal budget related information and guide them on making submissions on development priorities to local councils; and assist some of the target groups in analyzing how the development priorities are addressed in the 2006 budgets. The pilot project will be conducted in the Ugu District Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province.The institute was established in 1986 and played a significant role in the country’s transition by helping to link the apartheid government with opposition leaders outside the country. Its programs include a training center for democracy, a parliamentary information monitoring service, community policing and numerous publications on the transition to democracy in South Africa.