Community Work - Budget Advocacy for Better Health

Community Work – Budget Advocacy for Better Health

Introduction

SPII continues to be committed to facilitating public participation in governmental budgeting processes. Part of this is continuing the advocacy work we have started with the Chiawelo Budgeting for Change group, based in Soweto. A series of budgeting workshops were held with this group from the period of inception of the project with the last 2 workshops held in May 2021.

A big part of effective budget advocacy is being able to capacitate communities to champion better service delivery for themselves, guided by the governmental budget cuts and allocations. This was the recurring theme of our Budget School workshops: we facilitated budget literacy material aimed at bringing budget information closer to the people. Our Constitution protects and upholds the civil liberty of public participation. Through these budget literacy workshops with the Chiawelo group, we make South African budgeting processes more accessible to citizens, from tackling the often alienating financial jargon, to encouraging community members to advocate for better social services ......

Photos and footage from our site visit with Chiawelo community members at the Chiawelo Community Practice (including concerned citizens and clinic users, clinic staff and health professionals, Community Health Workers, traditional healers, senior citizen clubs, local community organisations, and ward committee members), which took place towards the end of 2019.

This engagement was aimed at immersive learning and took place over multiple days, using participatory action research methods in order to establish Community concerns related to health.

This was all towards creating specifically tailored training material for community learning on budget basics for better health.