Yemisi Izuora
Tracka has announced the expansion of its transparency advocacy into three new states – Anambra, Abia, Bayelsa, Bauchi, Benue and Kastina – in collaboration with Google Impact Challenge.
A social platform that mobilizes citizens to collaborate, track budgets and give feedback on public projects in their communities, Tracka hitherto operated in 22 states across Nigeria since inception in 2014, combining both physical and digital advocacy to ensure implementation of government projects, which are mostly abandoned, uncompleted or poorly executed, through citizen collaboration and government engagement.
“A fortune of funds are allocated as capital expenditure, yet, projects are left undone. We tracked 1,228 projects between May 2017 and June 2018. Of these, only 478 were completed, 200 ongoing, 364 not started, 173 had unspecified locations while 13 were abandoned, as of October 2018,” said Ilevbaoje Uadamen, Head Tracka.
Thus, this expansion is to establish a civic relationship that would enable the beneficiary communities, stakeholders and project facilitators to ensure accountability and quality service delivery,” he added.
In the new states, Tracka’s budget monitoring activities will focus on 72 communities where capital projects are awarded, by fully deploying our Project Tracking Officers (PTO) who will work with stakeholders, community champions as well as CSOs to empower community members with the data and information required to hold governments as well as its officials to account.
In furtherance of national development, we would continue to work with actors in the civic realm and relevant stakeholders to persistently engage governments at all levels on the use of funds, accountability and budget implementation.