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Status: activeType: 🏛️ civic techCountry: Nigeria Website: budgit.org
Status active
Type 🏛️ civic tech
Country Nigeria
Website budgit.org
Contact info@budgit.org
+234 908 333 1633
Contact form ↗
Concepts Radical Transparency Democracy Tools E Government
Last activity 2026-08-25 dod
Site checked and page created: publications library updated 19 August 2026, headlines and country offices (Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, US) all current

BudgIT

BudgIT is a Nigerian civic-tech organisation founded in 2011 with a narrow, stubborn premise: a public budget nobody can read is not public. Its founding work was reformatting Nigeria's federal budget — a document technically available and practically impenetrable — into infographics, plain-language summaries and interactive dashboards.1

The organisation's mission statement makes the theory of change explicit: "To use creative technology to simplify public information, stimulating a community of active citizens and enabling their right to demand accountability, institutional reforms, efficient service delivery and an equitable society."2

From publishing to checking

The more interesting half of BudgIT's model is what came after the infographics. In 2014 it launched Tracka, which inverts the direction of information: instead of BudgIT explaining the budget to citizens, citizens report back on whether the borehole, clinic or classroom line-itemed in their constituency actually exists.3 That closes a loop most budget-transparency work leaves open — publication of an allocation is not evidence of a delivery.

Its other recurring outputs include State of States, an annual assessment of the fiscal health of Nigeria's 36 states; a States Fiscal Transparency League ranking subnational governments on disclosure; and dashboards for federal budget analysis and primary healthcare accountability.

Advocacy, and what it changed

BudgIT's OpenNASS campaign, begun in 2015 with EiE Nigeria, pushed the National Assembly to publish its own budget — a document the legislature had kept unpublished while scrutinising everyone else's. The campaign succeeded in 2018.4 In 2017 the organisation also publicly challenged roughly N500bn of insertions into the federal budget.

In the same year it launched Civic Hive as its innovation centre — a Lagos civic-tech fellowship and incubator, tracked separately in this landscape, which describes itself as "an extension of BudgIT."5

Where it works

BudgIT now runs country offices beyond Nigeria — in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, with a Washington DC presence at the Open Gov Hub.6 The expansion is worth noting for what it implies about the model's portability: the specific pathology BudgIT was built to fix — large public budgets, weak subnational disclosure, and a wide gap between allocation and delivery — is not a Nigerian peculiarity.

Why it belongs in the landscape

Budget transparency organisations are common; the ones that also build the feedback path from citizen back to institution are rarer. BudgIT sits alongside the fiscal-transparency and participatory-budgeting work this landscape already tracks, and its Tracka model is the clearest African example of a tool designed to convert published data into a specific, addressable demand on a named representative.

Key people

  • Oluseun Onigbinde — co-founder; Global Director
  • Joseph Agunbiade — co-founder; Chief Technical Officer

See also

  1. "2011 Oluseun meets Joseph, BudgIT joins CcHUB pre-incubation programme" About Us ✓ Verified, BudgIT, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  2. "To use creative technology to simplify public information, stimulating a community of active citizens and enabling their right to demand accountability, institutional reforms, efficient service delivery and an equitable society." About Us ✓ Verified, BudgIT, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  3. Our History Citation only, BudgIT, retrieved 25 August 2026.  ↩

  4. Our History Citation only, BudgIT, retrieved 25 August 2026.  ↩

  5. "Civic exists as an extension of BudgIT as a creative civic tech organization driven to retell the Nigerian budget and public data in a finer detail across every literacy span." About us ✓ Verified, Civichive, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  6. "Washington United States Open Gov Hub, 1100 13th St NW Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005" Contact ✓ Verified, BudgIT, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

History