Group Commends Jigawa Govt for approving N47.07b Projects chosen by citizens

By Ahmed Rufa’i Dutse

The Exceptional Leadership and Integrity Promotion (ELIP) Initiative has commended the Jigawa state government for reflecting 548 citizens’ inputs in the 2024 approved budget with N47.07 billion cost of improvement of the projects.

This report on comparative analysis of citizens’ inputs in to 2024 approved budget conducted by ELIP-Initiative which was obtained by the National Update indicated that there are more citizens’ inputs in 2024 budget than ever before.

The National Update checks indicated that there is consistent reflection of citizens’ inputs in the Jigawa state annual budget where people in the state through Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) had submitted a total of 1105 inputs to the state government during the 2024 budget preparations.

The documents obtained by the this online newspaper in the state indicated that “Iut of the of 1105 inputs submitted 548 inputs reflected representing 49.6 percent of total inputs submitted”.

According to the ELIP-Intiative “the number of citizens’ inputs reflected in the budget is amounting to over N47.O7 billion representing 26.8 percent ot the total budget of N175.4 billion for 2024”.

“Citizens gave more inputs in the Education, Agricultural, Water Resources, Health, Women Affairs, Economic Employment and Works sectors.

The comparative analysis indicated that number of citizens’ inputs reflected in 2024 is higher than that of 2023 and subsequent previous years.

Our reporter in the state gathered that in there was online 543 inputs by citizens in 2022 in which only 37.0 percent reflected with only 20.0 percent implementation and in 2023 the number of inputs by citizens were 945 and government entertained 341, “but in 2024, there were 1105 inputs and over 562 were accepted and reflected”.

The group said transparent process in Jigawa begins with when an individual citizen’s inputs are harvested, pushed forward to the government to be included in annual budget for better lives of the citizens.

ELIP-Initiative is an organization that has dedicated it’s resources to collating and analyzing the inputs and it’s eventual submission to the affected MDAs for onward application.