Briefing Paper

Enhancing Public Budget Transparency in Botswana

“This policy brief discusses the need to make Botswana’s budget process more transparent. Transparent or open budgets both facilitate and support timely, relevant public access to budget information, enhancing citizen participation in the budgetary process. Transparent budgets also strengthen the role and independence of oversight institutions such as Parliament and Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) or the Office of the Auditor General – in order to engender budgetary accountability.The objective of this brief is to advocate for the opening up of Botswana’s budgetary process. While Botswana has generally performed highly in terms of political governance indicators, economic performance,
and credit rating among others, performance in indices of fiscal transparency has been generally low.”