Each month, we shine a spotlight on partners who are using budget advocacy to bring transformational change to their communities. This month, we’re highlighting Özge Aktaş, executive director of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation. This story was produced with the financial support of the European Union.
Your organization has served as the research partner for Türkiye for the Open Budget Survey since its inception. What can you tell us about your experience?
TESEV is focused on good governance issues and creating strictly evidence and data-based policies and suggestions. So the OBS survey is very significant and we really appreciate that both the government and civil society are equally involved. It’s almost two decades now that TESEV has been involved in this work. And two decades is a long time in any country’s history, and particularly in Türkiye’s – because a lot of things have changed. During this time, transparency and accountability have increased in the budget work of the government and key changes have been added to the agenda of many public bodies. So, it’s really pleasing to see increasing scores in those areas. Still, some scores are yet to be increased, such as the public participation score (which was zero in the current survey).
Representatives from the Turkish government and TESEV recently joined an EU-sponsored weeklong budget training in Belgrade, Serbia that was convened by International Budget Partnership. What was gained from that event?
In that meeting, the government representative and TESEV representative met for the first time, exchanged ideas and interchanged their opinions on the most recent OBS results. I really find that valuable because we are working on increased civil society-government cooperation. We’re trying to do a lot of work not just on the budget, but in other areas as well. We’re trying to increase the capacity of civil society organizations on informed participation and opening up the channels for more and better informed advocacy activities. So, we see the Belgrade meeting as an opportunity for that type of interaction.
Aside from the Open Budget Survey, TESEV is very active in gender issues. What kind of work are you doing in this area?
Gender, and gender-responsive budgeting has been on TESEV’s agenda for a very long time – particularly how gender vulnerabilities are dispersed around the metropoles (towns) and how public bodies should intervene. We do crowdsourcing, where women themselves can pin the [service delivery] problem points on a map and the public bodies will see that. We also try to voice the problems of women using the data that is available nationally and locally. Most of the time that’s a very tricky thing to do because the quality of data is limited. But once we gather that, we create a very precious policy tool that public bodies, civil society organizations and the general public can use. A lot of the data is being underused by the public bodies and if they used that data more efficiently, the policies they generate and the action plans they come up with would be more accurate and hitting the target. That’s what TESEV argues and that’s what we’re trying to prove.
In terms of gender equity , what are your hopes for a future Türkiye?
In a perfect world in Türkiye, ideally all ministries and relevant public bodies should be working together. Having one ministry focusing its work on women is not enough. Women should be on the agenda for a lot of ministries. Women should be invited to the planning processes as well. Planning should be participatory because women’s organizations in Türkiye are quite strong and they know what they are doing. Even in data collection, like the Turkish Statistical Institute, which decides on what data to collect, the women’s agenda should also be on that. It should reflect the vulnerabilities and should reflect intersectionalities. Only then the picture will be complete and only then women will benefit.
