Call for Proposal

INTRODUCTION

Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) is a Knowledge Institution registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission as a Charity. It was established to introduce professionalism in civil society work and to use social entrepreneurship to provide cutting edge services to enhance and deepen economic, social and political change.

CSJ is developing Budgetpedia, a single internet portal to serve as a primary and definitive source of information on budgeting in Nigeria containing and displaying all public sector budgeting information at all times. Part of the requirements for the project is a web-based platform for budget data analysis, benchmarking and calculations.

REQUIREMENTS

CSJ requires the services of highly skilled website developers to submit proposals on improving Budgetpedia for budget data analysis and calculations. The platform will be designed to take in official budget documents from the various levels of Government across the nation as inputs in pdf formats, extract the data from the documents and append them to a database while maintaining the structure. Calls will be made from the client side to carryout various calculations, analysis and data visualization. The database will also be accessible publicly through API. CSJ is mostly concerned with how any proposed solution will automatically extract and append the data from the budget documents which come in various structures to the database without losing or wrongly positioning any data.

Some of the functionalities include:

FILTER FUNCTIONS

The search for documents can be done by

• Ministry, Department and Agency
• Keywords e.g., welfare, rent etc.
• Budget Identification code
• Year
• Implementation Location
• Amount range
• Type (new or ongoing)
• Expenditure type class i.e., recurrent, overhead, capital or personnel
• Project name

It is necessary to note that multiple items can be selected in the filter query to get more specific results e.g., “Ministry of Education 2020 New”. This search query returns all new projects the Ministry of Education embarked on in 2020.

ANALYTICS FUNCTIONS

Analysis of budget is a function that will be included. Some of the analysis features required include:

• Comparison: Comparing data using filter function. What this means is that one can compare various statistics of the budget. These statistics can be streamlined using the filter function like above. E.g., one can decide to compare the “Ministry of Education 2020 New” and “Ministry of Education 2021 New” or even Agriculture 2021 and Defence 2021. The result will be displayed in a table. This comparison also can feature comparison between the actual budget and implementation reports.

• Benchmarking: There are declarations and pledges that Nigeria has signed in times past like the Abuja Declaration on health 2001 mandating Governments to allocate 15% of the budget to health. What the benchmarking function will do in this instance, is to check if the health budget of any year meets that criterion. This benchmarking will also be done against any numerical data from the yearly budget Call Circular, etc.

• Data Summarisation/visualisation: This involves the display of key items summarised to simpler layman understandable form and displaying them using infographics. For example, the total amount in the budget that directly targets women can be displayed using infographics.

• Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, percentages and general calculations that can throw up immediate answers to calculations from particular budgets or sets of budgets.

For a samples of budget documents visit, budgetpedia.ng. All responses and questions should be sent to procurement@csj-ng.org .