Introduction

Funnel the Money: Allocating Resources to Reduce Poverty is being developed by the World Resources Institute and its partners.

Funnel the Money seeks to help governments and policy-makers design and implement policies that allocate intergovernmental transfers in ways that reduce poverty and improve the delivery of services vital to driving economic development and increasing peoples' well-being and quality of life. In addition, Funnel the Money aims to provide citizens with a transparency tool to help assess and provide input to their governments' performance in distributing fiscal resources.

Intergovernmental transfers - money transferred from one government to another within a country - make up large portions of many local governments' budgets, and often play an important role in realizing national priorities. Transfers from central to local governments are especially critical in ensuring that decentralized services, such as health care and education, are adequately delivered to citizens.

Given their importance, the distribution of transfers from central to local governments is an important question, and one that inspires significant debate. The criteria used to allocate transfers often include overall populations, numbers of school-aged children or elderly individuals, citizens' average incomes, etc, with different local governments often advocating rationales that justify their receiving significant transfers. Although some countries have managed to keep such transfers simple, the mechanisms used to determine size of transfers to different localities employ multiple criteria and can be quite complicated. This is exacerbated by the fact that the methods to determine transfers are usually not easily accessible or presented in ways that are transparent.

Funnel the Money seeks to make such transfers transparent and to help shift the mechanisms used to assign transfers so they favor poverty reduction and maximize well-being.

Funnel the Money uses a variety of sources for its information, and every data set is presented with its corresponding source. By making information more available and easier to understand, Funnel the Money provides a helpful tool to decision-makers and researchers.

How to use Funnel the Money

The "Explore Data" menu presents measures of poverty and well-being at a sub-national scale directly adjacent to data on transfers from central to local governments. This simple, visual presentation of data side-by-side allows for quick, intuitive comparisons of the data and leads to new insights and questions that other ways of presenting information often fail to provide. In some cases the distribution of transfers will appear fair based on these comparisons. In others, questions about why transfers are distributed the way they are will arise - for example, why the largest per capita transfers are allocated to a district with the highest per capita income.

Who are Funnel the Money's Audiences?

Our tool is useful to a variety of audiences, including:

• central government policy-makers responsible for developing and implementing the policies that allocate central government transfers;
• local government officials interested in fully understanding how allocations are made and using scenarios to propose alternate, more equitable, approaches;
• civil society organizations advocating for policies that will maximize poverty reduction;
• citizens interested in measuring their local leaders effectiveness in reducing poverty and improving the quality of peoples' lives;
• international donor organizations and donor countries seeking information on how well a country allocates available resources for peoples' benefit;

Status of Funnel the Money

Funnel the Money is currently working with local partners to further develop its database through data localization, upload, and translation. Each country is developed to a different level, depending on the level of information availability.

Global Partners

While the World Resources Institute is leading the overarching design and development of the Funnel the Money software program, it will be up to our local partners to fully utilize our tool by, creating country pages in Funnel the Money--researching country policies and transfer data, using the data to shape policy, informing the public, holding officials accountable, etc.

Our partners are currently working to develop our site's capabilities and scope by uploading new data and translating the site into local languages.

Some of these local partners include the Association of Young Economists of Georgia, the Public Finance Monitoring Center, based in Azerbaijan, the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Kyrgyzstan, and the Tax Standards Formation and Sange Research Center, based in Kazakhstan.

Funders

WRI gratefully acknowledges the United States Agency for International Development for providing the funds needed to develop the Funnel the Money online software, and additional grants to deploy the tool in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.

We also thank the diverse donors who have made WRI’s Strategic Opportunity Fund possible for supporting development of the tool in Nigeria.

Contact information:

Feel free to contact us with any questions, comments, or suggestions you might have regarding the project.

Christian Layke
World Resources Institute
10 G. St. NE; Suite 800
Washington DC 20002
USA