Description
Access to information and public supervision are essential prerequisites for improving the efficiency of state administration and self-government and the engagement of civil society. Poor awareness of regional and municipal policies hampers public policy control. The same applies in relation to enterprises established by the state or by self-government. Unless these entities are sufficiently transparent, the public can not sufficiently assess the effectiveness of their operation and cannot oversee the links between these businesses and politicians, which again creates a space for waste, clientelism and corruption. The lack of information on financial stability and transparency of self-government regions open the door to irresponsible debt and inappropriate spending. The aim of this project is to improve the efficiency of the state administration, self-government and civil society in the area of creation and control of regional policies, administration of state-owned enterprises, and monitoring of budgets and information openness of municipalities. The applicant wants to achieve this by transferring know-how from unique and highly-rated projects implemented in Slovakia. The applicant wants to build on previous activities implemented in Moldova with the support of SlovakAid and the US Embassy in Chisinau. Specific goals and activities: 1) Improving the quality of regional regulation and legislation through a regular expert assessment of the impacts of regional socio-economic measures - the applicant's local partner will monitor regional measures taken by local authorities; The selected key actions will be thoroughly analyzed and submitted to the panel of independent experts; The results of the evaluation will be made public. 2) Improving public control over the functioning of state-owned enterprises through an evaluation of the information openness of state-owned enterprises - the applicant and the partner will analyze how the top 50 state-owned companies report on their activities and will create an interactive portal with results for individual businesses. 3) Improving financial stability of state-owned enterprises through financial analysis tools – Applicant and Partner will analyze financial indicators of 50 top public companies, compare them with each other and with private sector standards, and create an interactive portal with results for individual businesses. 4) Strengthening transparency of municipalities through updating data in the portals of budgets and transparency of cities and municipalities (the portals have been created by the applicant 2 years ago in another SlovakAid project) – expected activities: collection of actual data on budgets and information openness, upgrading the interactive models, analyzing the developments over the past two years. The new project will bring to the public, media, and policy itself unique monitoring tools (interactive web portals) to control governmental and self-government activities in the following areas: quality of adopted regional economic and social measures, information openness and financial stability of state-owned companies, information openness and financial stability of cities and regions. After the project implementation, we expect improvement in management of public companies and municipalities (debt reduction, better economic results), better and more comprehensive information about activities of public companies and local authorities (more clear information according to defined standards), change in the quality of regional regulation resulting from higher public pressure put on local politicians.