By David Agba Abuja
Th e federal government yesterday followed up its consultations on the 2018 budget by enlisting 4,250 top offi cers selected across 800 Ministries, Department and Agencies ( MDAs) for training on 2018 budget preparation using real time online platform.
Scheduled for two weeks the intense training on budget, will hold in six cities across the six geo- political zones of the country including the Federal Capital Territory ( FCT), Director – General , Budget Offi ce of the federation, Ken Akabueze said yesterday when he declared open training of MDAs on 2018 budget using GIFMIS.
Addressing training participants , Akabueze said over 1,830 participants will be trained in week one in Abuja adding that, participants being trained in Abuja were drawn from FCT and North Central geo- political zones except kwara state whose participants he said will be trained in Ibadan due to the state proximity to Ibadan.
He added that participants from other zones will be trained in Kaduna, Gombe , Uyo, Enugu, Lagos and Ibadan. ” You will recall that the current administration adopted the Zero Based Budgeting ( ZBB) methodology to help ensure more optimal utilization of government resources on projects. To improve the quality of our budgeting process, we are committed to making the most use of technology and automation tools. For the 2017 budget, MDAs prepared and submitted their budgets online and in realtime using a ZBB compliant web based application.
It was the fi rst time that MDAs were using an online system to prepare and submit their budget with no manual intervention. Th e use of the web based application helped eradicate a lot of the challenges encountered in previous years “. ” For 2018 budget preparation, we intend to improve on the experiences of the 2017 budget preparation process. Based on the feedback from the 2017 budget preparation, we have simplifi ed the ZBB structure. Programs and Sub- programs have been merged in to activities and mapped to the GIFMIS platform “, said DG budget.
