Participatory Budgeting local facilitators seminar – 2017
On the 20th & 21st of January 2017, the “Associative Action” organized a sharing experiences’ seminar for the local facilitators of the municipalities of Ariana, Monastir, Sidi Bouzid, Gremda, Béjà & Zaghouan, who contributed to the implementation of the Participatory Diagnosis as well as the Participatory Budgeting process in their municipalities.
This seminar was a good opportunity for the local facilitators to exchange experiences with each other, assess the results achieved in each city, and work out a plan to ensure the sustainability of the process.
Sidi Bouzid’s citizen delegates forum
After the organization of the citizen forums of the Participatory Budgeting process, the municipality of Sidi Bouzid organized, on the 14th of October 2017, the citizen delegates forum which gathered the 9 citizen elected delegates. The role of the delegates was to sort, by priority, the projects voted by the citizens based on the Participatory Budgeting principles, specifically the principles of equity and solidarity.
The technical service of the municipality attended the forum in order to provide necessary technical and administrative information to the citizen delegates. The financial services took also part in this forum to provide the preliminary estimated cost of each project voted by the citizens, and which is technically feasible. Besides, the local facilitators of the Participatory Budgeting participated in the logistical preparation of this forum, as well as, to provide support to the citizen delegates in their work.
Based on all these pieces of information, and according to the budget allocated to the projects of the Participatory Budgeting process from the municipality of Sidi Bouzid (1.225.000 Tunisian Dinars for the roads and pavements, public lightening and embellishment of the city), the citizen delegates reached a consensus on a list of 24 projects over 30 to be implemented by the municipality.
Moreover, the citizen delegates created monitoring committees in order to supervise and evaluate the implementation of the decided projects, as mentioned in the following documents.
Citizen projects’ location visit in Sidi Bouzid
At the end of the Citizens’ Forum series, the municipality of Sidi Bouzid organized on the 13th of october 2017 a visit to the location of the projects voted by the citizens and aprouved by the technical service of the municipality for their technical and administrative feasibility.
This visit was made in the presence of the 9 elected citizen delegates, the local participatory budgeting facilitators and representatives of Sidi Bouzid municipality’s technical service.
This visit covered the sites of the 30 voted projects of basic infrastructure.
Training of local facilitators on the Participatory Budgeting in Sidi Bouzid
On the 30th of August 2017, the Associative Action organized a training session for the members of local CSOs in Sidi Bouzid to become local facilitators of Participatory Budgeting.
The role of the local facilitators is to collaborate with the members of the local authorities to successfully implement the awareness and communication campaign aimed to invite the citizens to participate in the citizen forums of the PB, as well as to organize the citizen forums (moderating the debate between municipal officers and citizens, facilitation of the citizens work groups, organization of the voting and election process related to the citizen projects ideas and citizen delegates).
