From Inclusion to Impact

Amenah F. Pangandaman is the 12th Secretary of the Department of Budget and Management. As the first Muslim and the second woman to hold this position, she offers diversity and fresh perspective to an otherwise male-dominated team of economic technocrats.

Prior to her appointment as the Secretary of Budget and Management, Pangandaman served as the Concurrent Assistant Governor for Strategic Communication and Advocacy and Executive Offices Coordinator at the BSP,
championing financial inclusion and digital transformation.

As the chief of the DBM, Pangandaman vows to pursue prudent management of the government’s fiscal resources, the modernization of the budget system, incorporation of sustainability and green principles in government spending, local development and finally, the promotion of sustainable economic growth.

She has a degree in Economics from the Far Eastern University and a diploma and master’s degree in Development Economics from the University of the Philippines. She was pursuing her Executive Master of Public Administration from the London School of Economics but is currently on leave to serve the DBM.

Zukiswa Kota is currently a Programme Manager at the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM), a regional civil society organisation based in South Africa. She has extensive experience supporting various social and budget justice interventions including the coordination of a civil society coalition working with the South African National Treasury to deepen public participation, transparency and fiscal accountability. Zukiswa is passionate about promoting social accountability and open governance in Africa, including through support to pan-African learning networks such as the Civic Tech Innovation Network.

Prior to her current role, Zukiswa was an education researcher and has written extensively on the subjects of resourcing, planning and governance in South Africa.An alumnus of the Open Government Leadership Collaborative, Zukiswa has also been amember of South Africa’s Interim Steering Committee for the Open Government Partnership.She serves on the boards of various organisations such as the Equal Education Law Centre and Corruption Watch as well as on the Advisory Board of the Public Economy Project at Wits University. She is a founding Chairperson of the Budget Justice Coalition and the Imali Yethu Coalition for Open Budgets.

Otávio Neves is the Director of Open Government and Transparency, in the Office of the Comptroller General of Brazil (CGU). In that position he leads the policies on Open Government, Transparency and Open Data. Mr. Neves was Project leader for the country’s first access to information system and for the current version of the Transparency Portal – an online tool to follow Every information on government’s spending, revenues, purchases, staff and much more.

Otávio has worked with Government transparency since 2009, and helped push several new border in transparency, such as bringing light into military pensions, civil servants salaries, invoices of public purchases and fiscal credits; while also working to encourage public oversight and protect vulnerable requesters of public information. His work was a awarded with two innovation awards and he was also awarded, by civil society, withe the Public Spirit award, in 2019, for his work on using digital tolos to promote public transparency.

Abayomi joined the International Budget Partnership in April 2023. As the Program Officer, Anglophone Africa, he is responsible for managing and coordinating the implementation of the Open Budget Survey in a subset of countries, providing technical assistance and support to IBP partners, in-country peer reviewers, and government officials throughout the Survey process in Anglophone Africa. Prior to joining IBP, Abayomi worked on the Nigerian Federal Government and World Bank-assisted States Fiscal Transparency Accountability and Sustainability (SFTAS) Program, where he deployed his expertise in public governance to support the 36 states in Nigeria in implementing participatory budgeting and open government principles.

He also worked with Reboot to support the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn (PERL) governance program of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). In this role, he brought a design thinking approach to the program, fostering citizen and citizen group inclusion in governance across three Nigerian states.

He also served at BudgIT Foundation, managing institutional transparency, anti-corruption, open government and security justice programs to enhance civic engagement and governance across Nigeria and other African countries.

Abayomi holds a Master of Public Administration from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics from the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta. He has certificates in Evidence in Public Policy from Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, UK; Public Management from Howard University, Washington DC; and Result-based Monitoring and Evaluation from the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), Ghana. In recognition of his contributions to improving governance in Nigeria, Abayomi was awarded the Mandela Washington Fellowship Award in 2017 by the US State Department and the Walter Carrington Youth Fellowship Award in 2016 by the US Consulate, Lagos.