Over the years, many corruption reduction strategies including some improvement around open data at Federal and State level, but nothing significant is been done to curb corruption at the Local Government level in Nigeria. Unfortunately, the impact of corruption at the Local Government (grassroots) levels is more devastating on the huge number of Nigerians who live and work at these local areas. Citizens are the Local Government are usually alienated from their government as they are unaware of the local government budget, procurement and execution of contracts and project, while feedbacks on spending are never provided and more distressing is that they are never called on consultation on budget and other development initiatives. Consequently, the Local Government in Nigeria has lots of its public infrastructure in disarray; widespread and extreme poverty; and deep social inequality. Specifically, health care, basic education, economic opportunities, social protection, etc. are poorly delivered and/or broken. Though, the situation is dire, we believe it is neither hopeless nor incurable.
Since establishment, billions of Naira has gone into the Local Government Authorities (LGAs) without the desired impact and in its efforts to debottleneck administration of LGAs and ensure financial independence, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) Guidelines of May 2019 on LGAs administration was pronounced by the Federal Government. The NFIU directives has puts bite to LGA autonomy and a stop to State government corrupt access to LGA funds.
To this end, Life and Peace Development Organization (LAPDO) through the project will consolidate to strengthen the NFIU directive on Local Government administration by supporting grassroots citizens access to various data set such as federal allocation; LGA budget; procurement process; auditing, staff strength; ongoing project etc; to enable active engagement, get 2-ways feedbacks and allow for comparative analysis of progress made by LGAs in compliance with open data and anti-corruption fight towards good governance.