Bu Husnani, an activist with Indonesia’s PRIMA Coalition focusing on working to improve water, sanitation and hygiene services in coastal communities, opens her water tank during the monsoon rains in Indonesia while waiting for the water tanker that supplies her neighbourhood.
Bu Husnani, an activist with Indonesia’s PRIMA Coalition focusing on working to improve water, sanitation and hygiene services in coastal communities, opens her water tank during the monsoon rains in Indonesia while waiting for the water tanker that supplies her neighbourhood.
Annual Report 2025
The Year in Numbers
We drove meaningful changes in how public money is raised and spent, strengthened budget analysis and advocacy skills, made our voice heard at the regional and global level to build transparency and accountability into every decision about public money and helped millions gain better access to basic services.
We turned data into action, helped drive meaningful changes in how public money is raised and spent and supported millions in gaining better access to services in the four countries where we have in-depth programs and offices.
14M
Asivikelane members demonstrate through their trainings how community members are able to repair and maintain their own taps.
People in more than 30 countries, including grassroots, civil society and women-led groups were directly trained in budget analysis and implementation, public finance, service delivery monitoring, procurement oversight, gender-responsive taxation and evidence-based advocacy
221
369
42
Indonesia water and sanitation activist Bu Husani surveys her community’s water supply with a local government officer.
IBP Executive Director Ana Patricia Muñoz speaks at the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development in Sevilla, Spain.
42
82
6,000
195,075
4.7M
715
Simon Pierre Douamba, Program Manager at the Centre pour la Gouvernance Démocratique in Burkina Faso, participates in a training session during a regional convening in Istanbul, Türkiye.
Building civic capacity at scale
Across all of our work, we helped train communities to monitor delivery of basic services, oversee budget implementation and focus on gender-responsive taxation.
26,360
1,064
Leveraging Data-Informed Partnerships to Drive Change
We leveraged the skills of 26,000 people across a broad range of civic groups to turn community insights into standardized data that governments can act on to manage public money better. These skills — in budget analysis, political navigation and coalition building to bring civil society, government and others together around shared goals — are key to ensuring our partners don’t just participate in budget and planning processes; they shape them. By building coalitions and leveraging community-generated evidence, we are making public spending more transparent, effective, equitable and responsive to people’s needs.
Our relationship with government officials has changed because we are the ones that provide them with the data from the grassroots.
Our South Africa initiative, Asivikelane, a coalition of grassroots organizations working together to amplify the voices
of informal settlements residents about basic services, at their team retreat in Boschendal, South Africa.
10.692 M
4.057 M
15.222 K
We turned evidence into action
Across Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa, we worked with women-led groups, grassroots coalitions, frontline service providers and accountability allies to embed community-generated evidence into government decisions about water, sanitation, primary and maternal health, and agricultural support. As a result, they could take an active role in improving how governments execute budgets and how services are delivered at the grassroots level—where people are most likely to see the daily impacts of government spending. This led to key results below.
Strengthening budget advocacy for reform
We are supporting budget advocates to improve accountability practices, using the Open Budget Survey implemented in 82 countries as a springboard to assess priority areas, from budget execution of key social sectors to debt decision-making — and to pinpoint accountability gaps as well as opportunities for reform. As a result of sustained advocacy, our partners secured key wins— Cambodia incorporated Open Budget Survey indicators into the Ministry of Finance’s public financial management action plan, Egypt committed to enshrining a participatory budgeting model, Sri Lanka’s 2025 national budget included an allocation for mental health awareness and social counseling, Rwanda started a new OBS Task Force that provides a formal bridge between the Auditor General, the Ministry of Finance and civil society, and Morocco piloted a national methodology for gender budget tagging.
Sophal Mar, Program Manager at NGO Forum on Cambodia.
Public financial management is very important, because if we don’t have any proper laws, public participation and citizen monitoring, it can lead to corruption and waste of the money that people pay (in taxes) to the government.
200
117%
5.8%
Youth budget training in Jordan.
Public finances aren’t neutral. Morocco has adopted gender considerations in public policies, but the budgets allocated to equality remain minimal. What’s missing is real impact. This is why creating a space for dialogue and consultation between parliamentarians and civil society is very important.
Strengthening Accountability Ecosystems
We foster sustained, embedded relationships between civil society, government and other accountability ecosystem actors like legislators, auditors, media, frontline service providers and international organizations to solve problems collaboratively and ensure public money delivers results for everyone. Governments now regularly use civil society’s inputs to decide how to raise and spend public money and our partners have gained regular seats at the tables where fiscal matters are debated and decided.
Institutionalizing community-generated data to inform government decisions
Across Nigeria, Indonesia, Senegal, and South Africa, our partners are embedded in government planning and budgeting decision-making spaces, ensuring lasting impact on efforts to expand access to healthcare, water and sanitation and agricultural support. Our partners are now seen as allies with government in co-diagnosing gaps and proposed solutions.
Nigeria – We identified an inactive state health trust fund law mandating that 5% of internally generated revenue may be spent on primary healthcare upgrades and maternal health.
Indonesia – Women with disabilities and fisherfolk have gained leadership seats in Musrenbang — the national process for deciding local development projects and budgets.
South Africa – We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the town of Knsyna Municipality, which formally integrates the community plumbing initiative and uses the plumbers we have trained to undertake repairs on behalf of the municipality, reducing response times for repairs and providing income for community members.
Senegal – Through direct engagement with government, we helped shape the Public Health Code to better address the health needs of women and girls and contributed to a Universal Health Coverage strategy that has lowered financial barriers and expanded access to care. We also helped unlock unspent municipal health funds in three Guédiawaye municipalities representing 30% of local health budgets.
From promises to delivery: Resolving spending bottlenecks
Oftentimes what is budgeted and what reaches communities — especially those that are most excluded or far from centers of power — are two different realities. In our four country offices, we brought grassroots partners, budget groups, officials and other accountability allies together to understand how and why allocated funds do not flow to local clinics, sanitation and other services. We forged coalitions to develop sustainable solutions to fix these spending gaps and deliver for communities.
Nigeria
In Nigeria we launched pilot Public Financial Management Action Labs in Oyo, Ogun and Niger States to ensure that health funding does not get stuck in the budget pipeline. The labs bring together government officials from the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Finance with civil society organizations and technical experts who conduct quarterly reviews to trace primary health care budget lines step by step through approval, release, procurement and implementation.
We noticed that there is a problem with access to information about procurement. Most of the information was grossly missing or incomplete. When information is missing, accountability is weakened.
Indonesia
In Indonesia we helped ensure that allocated funds for clean drinking water and sanitation reached coastal communities.
Wulandari poses at the OGP convening in Manila, Philippines.
We have a vision of how to improve the lives of marginalized groups (in Indonesia) through their involvement in public budget decisions.
8%
95%
116
Senegal
In Senegal, vendor validation delays leading to unspent health and sanitation projects were released through national dialogues with government regulators and the Ministry of Finance.
22%
South Africa
In South Africa, we trained informal settlement facilitators in Gauteng to directly engage with municipal officials and residents to use procurement information to identify risks that lead to service failures.
Influencing Regional and Global Spaces
IBP Executive Director Ana Patricia Muñoz presenting the Open Budget Survey at the Innovation Marketplace during the Reimagining Public Finance Global Forum 2025 at World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, where reformers and researchers sought to rethink public financial management and its role in achieving development outcomes.
We took part in major global conversations about the future of international finance. We made the case for giving people a voice in how public money is spent, sharing findings from the Open Budget Survey and our other research, and drawing on our experience bringing together advocates for budget accountability.
Putting People at the Center of Financing for Development
The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Sevilla was a once-in-a-decade opportunity to infuence how the world finances sustainable development. We co-hosted several side events to advance an FfD4 agenda that recognized the importance of public participation and accountability to fuel progress.
200+
3,000+
500+
Attendees at the Second World Summit for Social Development in Doha, Qatar experiencing our interactive exhibit at the Solutions Square.
At the Second World Summit for Social Development in Doha, we built on the momentum of the Seville Platform for Action by co-hosting a high-level session that explored how fairer tax policies and budgets designed with women and girls in mind can work together to tackle deep-rooted inequality and drive meaningful development progress and by hosting an interactive exhibit in the Solutions Square.
Making public finance work for people
Across several global forums, we brought a consistent message: stronger public financial management systems only deliver results and translate into better development outcomes when communities have a voice in them. Our Indonesian colleagues presented at a gathering of the Fiscal Ecosystems project in Switzerland, sharing how they connect coastal communities and other marginalized groups with government and oversight actors to improve public services. We were also active at the World Bank Global Conference on Reimagining Public Finance, including on a panel on financing and supporting outcome-led reforms, and an Open Budget Survey presentation at the ideas expo. The Open Government Partnership Summit in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, brought us together with partners to reaffirm a shared commitment to public participation. In Madrid, we hosted a powerful session at the Walking the Talk: Financing Feminist Futures Conference, where grassroots women leaders from Senegal, Nigeria and South Africa shared how they are driving reforms to make tax and spending policies more gender responsive.
Advocating for equity in tax and debt
IBP Tax Manager Regina Navuga speaks at the Pan-African Conference on Illicit Financial Flows & Taxation in South Africa.
This year, tax and debt conversations loomed large as many countries grapple with growing debt burdens, aid declines and shrinking fiscal space. We advocated to ensure that governments consider equity implications in their efforts to mobilize domestic resources and to foster greater accountability in debt decision-making—recognizing that these revenue decisions have long-term implications on whether there is sufficient fiscal space to fund public spending. During the World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings, we argued that debt information needs to be integrated into national budget processes and legislatures and national auditors need to scrutinize borrowing decisions. Our Civil Society Policy Forum event drew on lessons from Senegal and Kenya and introduced our new OBS Debt Accountability Module. And at Debtcon8, we shared insights from our research on how parliaments in Kenya and Benin are working with civil society to improve debt oversight.
The best auditors of public debt are informed citizens.
Building Budget Accountability in Francophone Africa
IBP’s Djibril Badiane speaking at the 1st West African Forum on Francophone Public Finance in Burkina Faso.
Based out of our Senegal office, our efforts in Francophone Africa leverage shared language, similar public financial management systems, the normative power of regional institutions in setting shared standards and our expertise forging accountability allies around reform agendas to collectively strengthen accountable public resource governance in this region.
Our regional engagement began in 2018 by bringing together Open Budget Survey partners across nine countries — Burkina Faso, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Cameroon, DRC, Niger, Senegal, and Chad — to share knowledge and address common budget challenges. In the ensuing years, we deepened our capacity and advocacy support in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Cameroon, Madagascar and Togo. And in 2025, our Senegal team and partner Social Justice launched the EU-supported PACT BUDGÉTAIRE in Côte d’Ivoire to improve government budget transparency, bolster budget literacy within civil society, establish permanent roles for civil society in oversight bodies and foster sustainable dialogue between communities and government institutions. In Burkina Faso, we co-hosted the 1st West African Forum on Francophone Public Finance, bringing together civil society, Ministries of Finance, and audit institutions from across the region to develop a shared roadmap to strengthen execution-focused reforms and inclusive oversight within performance budgeting frameworks.
Moving forward, we will continue to build on the impact achieved so far through work in three key areas. First, we build the capacity of civil society organizations to conduct budget analysis and advocacy. Second, we build the capacity of legislatures and national audit offices to ensure oversight of budget processes and execution. Third, we advocate for accountability reforms using the Open Budget Survey as a roadmap.
10
50
100+
15
Rina Prasarani, of Himpunan Wanita Disabilias Indonesia (women with disabilities association) , presents a plaque to the Ombudsman of the Republic of Indonesia chair at a PRIMA Coalition event, marking the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two to advance accessibility in public service delivery.