| Fiscal Scope | Project Aims | Technology |
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
| Geographical Coverage | Democratic Republic of Congo (also been done in Dominican Republic) Mobile Voting has also taken place without the Bank in: Ipatinga Brazil, La Plata (Argentina), Belo Horizonte (Brazil) | |
| Scope | Local government | |
| Users/Audiences | Individual citizens | |
| Source Document | This section contains excerpts from Estefan and Weber’s short article | |
Voters in the Dominican Republic were asked how they felt about having the option to vote remotely via SMS.
### Project Resources 1. Knowledge of participatory design and community operation 2. Development knowledge in mobile telephony sector 3. Outreach skills 4. Cost of SMS: In the DRC one million messages were negotiated at 10,000 USD ### Timeframe 1. Training on PB: 8 cities - 2 months 2. Development: 2 months 3. Running a session: 2-4 hours ### Scalability There are 1500 cities around the world where participatory budgeting already takes place, and this approach could be considered as an option in them. Using mobiles could be used to encourage citizens is an approach that could be used in other contexts to promote citizen participation, not just PB. In some countries, such as Estonia, mobile voting has already been used in municipal elections and could be extended to other contexts. ###Successes 1. When the participants were asked what motivated them to take part in the meeting, the majority of respondents mentioned that the SMS had been the strongest deciding factor. 2. Since the beginning of the program, as the Provincial government sees an increase in the capacity of local government to allocate resources, communities involved have already seen an increase in transfer of funds from the Provincial to the local level. 3. The preliminary results of an external evaluation suggest that an increase of tax collection at the local level has been associated with the implementation of participatory budgeting. This is based upon testimonials offered by officials and numbers collected with the municipalities. However, given the high number of potential exogenous factors that could have contributed to this result, further assessment should be done before claiming a causal relationship. For the first time, communities such as Ibanda have gone from not having any investment budget to having 40% of their budget devoted to investments. In 2011, the Ministry of the Budget started the process of institutionalisation of Participatory Budgeting in the Province. 4. The increase in the transfer of funds from the provincial to the local level has benefited communities, which now have more resources to deliver public services to the poor. For instance, the process has made it possible to begin repairing 54 classrooms and a bridge in Luhindja, to create a health centre and repair the sewage system in Bagira, and to build a water fountain as well as toilets in local markets in Ibanda.  Participants in the Dominican Republic were asked how they had found out about the meeting.
### Challenges 1. Collecting numbers requires a lot of resources (Dominican Republic) 2. With some bulk message providers, some messages did not deliver until many hours later, some recipients received messages in the middle of the night! 3. More work needs to be done to help people monitor the execution of the projects. People are engaged in the process and feel empowered when they vote, but there is little follow-up and people could begin to become disillusioned with the project if they do not see results.