Day: January 25, 2022

The budget, as a contribution to transparency, provides support for a citizen monitoring platform.

Café Claro is a tool developed by the Citizen Participation movement that provides information on the management of public resources. The Director General of the Budget, José Rijo Presbot, received a visit from representatives of Citizen Participation and the Café Claro platform, as part of the transparency and social oversight strategy implemented by the General Directorate of Budget (Digepres) in the management of public resources. Fátima Lorenzo, Executive Director of Citizen Participation, and Rafael Gerardo Weisz, co-founder of Café Claro, presented the details of this technological tool, developed by the civic movement, to a group of Digepres staff members, led by Director General José Rijo Presbot and Deputy Director of Budget Iván Ramírez, with the aim of fostering closer ties and collaboration between the two entities. Rijo Presbot emphasized that one of the strategic pillars of the General Directorate of Budget is transparency and social oversight, which has been implemented through initiatives such as Citizen Encounter and engagement with society and public opinion. For her part, Fátima Lorenzo stated that they seek to strengthen mechanisms for accessing information. “As civil society, we must ensure that public administration becomes increasingly transparent and that access to information becomes increasingly simple and understandable,” she added. According to Gerardo, co-founder of Café Claro, the platform offers the possibility of monitoring the movement of public resources and the quality of spending. Furthermore, from the website caféclaro.org, citizens can conduct their own research using all the information collected and available on the portal. In this regard, the Director of the Budget Office valued this meeting and the work of Citizen Participation through Café Claro. “This initiative is very much in line with our desire, at Digepres, for citizens to be empowered in everything related to the management of resources and how public funds are spent,” said Rijo Presbot, while offering all the necessary information to contribute to the oversight work carried out through Café Claro. “We are making an effort to continuously improve the type of information provided to the public, making it more accessible and understandable, because budgets are a highly technical tool that deals with much more than just financial management,” emphasized Rijo Presbot. Iván Ramírez, Deputy Director General of the Budget, thanked them for the visit and reiterated the institution's commitment to making the necessary contributions to guarantee transparency and citizen access to the information generated by the General Directorate of Budgets (Digepres), and to supporting the work carried out by Participación Ciudadana (Citizen Participation) and Café Claro. Transparency and institutional strength: a shared objective. Café Claro is a citizen platform that aims to monitor public resources, sharing quality data with all citizens, with the goal of promoting transparency and institutional strength in the Dominican Republic. It also seeks to encourage citizens to learn about and participate in the process of monitoring the administration, oversight, and investment of public funds. These objectives are in line with the strategy implemented by Digepres, which, for the first time, has made available to citizens the tools that allow them to closely monitor every penny that the Government spends, through Budget Execution reports.