About Funnel the Money
Introduction
Funnel the Money: Allocating Resources to Reduce Poverty is being developed by the World Resources Institute and its partners.
Funnel the Money seeks to help governments policy-makers design and implement policies that allocate intergovernmental transfers in ways that reduce poverty and improve the delivery of services vital to driving economic development and increasing peoples' well-being and quality of life. In addition, Funnel the Money aims to provide citizens with a transparency tool to help assess and provide input to their governments' performance in distributing fiscal resources.
Intergovernmental transfers - money transferred from one government to another within a country - make up large portions of many local governments' budgets, and often play an important role in realizing national priorities. Transfers from central to local governments are especially critical in ensuring that decentralized services, such as health care and education, are adequately delivered to citizens.
Given their importance, the distribution of transfers from central to local governments is an important question, and one that inspires significant debate. The criteria used to allocate transfers often include overall populations, numbers of school-aged children or elderly individuals, citizens' average incomes, etc, with different local governments often advocating rationales that justify their receiving significant transfers. Although some countries have managed to keep such transfers simple, the mechanisms used to determine size of transfers to different localities employ multiple criteria and can be quite complicated. This is exacerbated by the fact that the methods to determine transfers are usually not easily accessible or presented in ways that are transparent.
Funnel the Money seeks to make such transfers transparent and to help shift the mechanisms used to assign transfers so they favor poverty reduction and maximize well-being.
How to use Funnel the Money
Funnel the Money is comprised of two main parts, "Explore Poverty and Transfers Data" and "Create Scenarios".
"Explore Poverty and Transfers Data" presents measures of poverty and well-being at a sub-national scale directly adjacent to data on transfers from central to local governments. This simple, visual presentation of data side-by-side allows for quick, intuitive comparisons of the data and leads to new insights and questions that other ways of presenting information often fail to provide. In some cases the distribution of transfers will appear fair based on these comparisons. In others, questions about why transfers are distributed the way they are will arise - for example, why the largest per capita transfers are allocated to a district with the highest per capita income.
"Create Scenarios" allows users to more fully understand the mechanisms that dictate how transfers are allocated, and to then build and view the results of scenarios that alter the allocation formulae. "Create Scenarios" presents the allocation criteria for a given country's transfers and allows users to change the weight given to various criteria in the formulae. The changes can be viewed via a map added above the side-by-side maps in "Explore Poverty and Transfers Data". This third map presents the results of the scenario as the user builds it and facilitates comparison with how transfers are currently distributed.
Who are Funnel the Money's Audiences?
The scenarios will prove useful to a variety of audiences, including:
- central government policy-makers responsible for developing and implementing the policies that allocate central government transfers;
- local government officials interested in fully understanding how allocations are made and using scenarios to propose alternate, more equitable, approaches;
- civil society organizations advocating for policies that will maximize poverty reduction;
- citizens interested in measuring their local leaders effectiveness in reducing poverty and improving the quality of peoples' lives;
- international donor organizations and donor countries seeking information on how well a country allocates available resources for peoples' benefit;
Funnel the Money recognizes that some of its intended audience may have limited to no internet access. Therefore, in addition to working as an online tool, Funnel the Money can be downloaded, or a CD may be requested for users to run the tool locally on their computer.
To request a CD, you can e-mail Christian Layke at clayke@wri.org or write to:
Christian Layke
World Resources Institute
10 G. St. NE; Suite 800
Washington DC 20002
USA
Status of Funnel the Money
Funnel the Money is in development at this time. A draft version of Funnel the Money using data for Ugandan has been developed and made available for testing and demonstration purposes. Before moving toward finalizing Funnel the Money, however, we wish to establish partnerships with non-profit and government groups in countries where Funnel the Money is being tested. This will help to ensure the product will support the needs of the policy-makers and advocates whom Funnel the Money is intended to support.
Funnel the Money Partners
The World Resources Institute is leading the overarching design and development of the Funnel the Money software program. Creating country pages in Funnel the Money--researching country policies and transfer data, using the data to shape policy, inform the public, hold officials accountable, etc. will be driven by local partners. We will be meeting with prospective partners in Uganda and Kenya in September 2006 and hope to create formal partnerships once funding for continuing the project has been secured.
- To be determined
- To be determined