Promoting transparency of municipal finances: the case of My Municipality in Brazil

My Municipality (Meu Município) a free public portal that organizes and makes available the financial performance of 90% of the Brazilian cities in a intuitive, user-friendly way. It is used for citizens to understand, monitor and compare how Brazilian municipalities collect and spend our money. My Municipality is also designed for public managers in their analysis and decision-making about the city's directions.

Innovation Summary

Innovation Overview

In Brazil, there are 5,570 municipalities, 80% with less than 50 thousand inhabitants. However, their revenue are not sufficient to pay all of their expenditures, which causes them to get highly in debt with federal government or other institutions (around 31% of the cities are in this situation). Along with this critical problem, municipalities have a prominent position in the provision of services and public investment. Ultimately, citizens' quality of life can be negatively affected due to these scarce or poor administered resources.

Following this great challenge in Brazil, in the year 2014, BRAVA Foundation created "Portal Meu Município" (My Municipality). My Municipality gathers municipal data from the National Treasury and IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) and synthesizes them in a simpler, understandable and comparable format. Through the platform, it is possible for citizens to see where their government revenue comes from and where it goes and also for public managers understand their indicators in order to create evidence-based policies.

BRAVA foundation is a non-partisan and non-profit organization which, since 2000, has already worked with state and municipal governments on high-impact projects on various public management issues, After more than 30 projects held and more than 9 million reais saved, BRAVA decided to scale its activity through My Municipality in order to help managers to do more with less resources and to help citizens to have a better understanding of where their money was being applied.

My Municipality has financial data of 90% of Brazilian municipalities, with historical series since 2013. Also, it provides easy data visualization and comparison of municipalities and its management indicators. In four years, more than 92% of municipalities have used our platform, from all Brazilian states. More than 3,3 million people have accessed our portal, with more than 5 million people reached through social media.

As a next step, we are working towards expanding the available data by showing indicators of the quality of expenditure in education and health. We will provide information of how the finances are turning into important services for population, crossing data with other open knowledge sources and comparing it not only among all municipalities, but also with the best practices in Brazil and the world. This new step is planned to be launched in the beginning of April.

Innovation Description

What Makes Your Project Innovative?

My Municipality became the biggest portal of municipal finances, due to its pioneer look at how an organized data would be quite helpful for public administrators and brazilian citizens. Its transforming way of showing indicators has made a clear tendency, since there are many other tools created in order to help small cities in Brazil.

However, My Municipality remains as the only one fully free and with reach of more than 90% municipalities, with a team dedicated to not only present indicators, but to help them to be understood, since there are many technical terms. In our platform, most of the information is shown in easy graphics, and with a glossary for democratizing access to public information by the population.

Innovation Development

Collaborations & Partnerships

My Municipality rely on important partnerships, such as economists who analyse the raw data; IT support, that are responsible for the website maintenance; SEBRAE (Brazilian Micro and Small Enterprises' Support Service) and FNP (National Front of Mayor), that helps us to publicize the platform in order to managers to use it; FGV and Insper, important academic institutions, with whom we partner to increase our analyses accuracy in order to get to the best practices of financial management.

Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

There are three main beneficiares of My Municipality;

- The public manager, who has more information and can make a qualified analysis for decision making and is also provided with a diagnotic tool with action plans;
- The citizen, that have more access to public data, that is, more information in accessible language to encourage debate and criticism;
- The Academy, to which is provided a wide database and can access data in CSV.

Innovation Reflections

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

- The platform has received more than 3 million access cases since 2014;
- More than 100 mayors were directly reached by the platform;
- Cover of Exame Magazine Online, the most important of finances in Brazil;
- 51 news about the portal in the Media;
- More than 11 associations reached to publicize the platform for public managers;
- 91% approval rate of the workshops for public managers;
- At least 11 municipalities used the portal to optimize their finances;
- We made a partnership with FGV (A Brazilian think tank) for a call for submissions for municipal finances, and had 66 articles received dedicated exclusively to the subject;
- 62 public institutions had recognized the project as relevant.

Challenges and Failures

The greatest challenge we face is the lack of engagement of city managers, the portal maintenance, and the lack of evidence-based policies. To overcome these challenges, we are partnering with institutions that work closely to public servants, as they have more access to engage and provide training for using My Municipality. This can also contribute to change their minds about using data, since many of the actions that can be done work for improving the city infrastructure.

The challenge of maintenance is still in progress to be solved, as we are working closer to our suppliers and partnering with other organization to spend less in analysing and updating the database.

Conditions for Success

1. IT Infrastructure - We need to assure good IT resources in order to have the platform working without any problems for users, guaranteeing a good UX.
2. Partnerships - Our partnerships with scholars, associations and media will keep our platform known through Brazil and assure we have updated data, as well as best practices brought by the most recognized institutions in Brazil and worldwide.
3. Simple comunication - As financial data is very technical, having a simple comunication helps us to reach a greater number of citizens and ensure we are in fact promoting transparency.
4. Human and financial resources - We need a strong, alligned team in order to develop strategies to promote our platform.

Replication

As part of our replication plan, we tend to work with partners in Brazil that already work with public managers, such as SEBRAE, FNP and municipalities' associations. Also, we are developing a strong PR (public relations) plan in order to keep engagement by population and reach higher number of access in our platform.
Moreover, in 2019, we will present the platform in more than 10 events related to best practices in city finances to promote its use not only by broad audience, but also by qualified users.

Lessons Learned

We had learned since 2014 that access to data is easy in Brazil, but raising interest by general public is very difficult, since most of data available by the government is very technical. We believe we have done a great job by "translating" data into real information, creating value for both citizens and public leaders by bringing them together and enhancing democracy.

Anything Else?

We believe having the recognition by OCDE will bring us to another level of legitimacy, since we will be attested for a extremely relevant institution as a relevant source of financial data, as well as an important player for enhancing transparency in Brazil when it comes to municipal finances.