The Minister of Finance and Development Planning, Dr Retšelisitsoe Matlanyane applauds DPE for having added citizen’s engagement value to the citizen budgeting process in Lesotho. This she said at the workshop closing the pre-budgeting engagement. The process was made of 10 district consultations, institutional and individual submissions. The Minister of Finance recognised other partners namely First National Bank, National University of Lesotho, UNICEF, and DPE.
DPE has collaborated with the Ministry of Finance by providing the citizen’s engagement expertise. This is in recognition of the contribution that DPE has been doing on enhancing citizen participation in the budget through popular community parliament.
Commenting on this, the Peace Education Researcher Lemohang Molibeli who has been assigned to the partnership indicated that this recognition challenges DPE to do more. “We now need to engage robustly in thinking about integrating this into the community parliament initiative, something which we can do but for which we really need resources” Said Molibeli.
Speaking at the same occasion, ‘M’e Lekomola, the Budget Controller commended DPE and other partners and went on to say that this process seeks to improve budget development process and implementation. “We need to strengthen budget convergence and monitoring and develop M&E mechanism to trace progress,” Maleshoane said.
