The Youth Cafe seeks to help Kenyan county governments crowdsource resource allocation and enhance positive change through youth involvement to improve their capacity to deliver cost-effective, qualitative public services.
Participatory Budgeting is both a democratic policymaking process and a more efficient budgetary and oversight mechanism. This project links democracy, fiscal/budget management, and new techologies through online group decision making software. It enables young people to comment, rank, and vote on local government projects based on weighted units, as distributed by expenditures, revenue, and surpluses/deficits.
The project’s benefits are reflected in increased delivery of greater budgetary investments to priorities of the youth demographic, increased efficiency in service delivery, and promotion of accountability in crucial sectors such as health, education, and environment.
Baringo County's budget for financial year 2017/18 is Kshs.6.64 billion, comprising of 3.98 billion and 2.66 billion allocation for recurrent and development expenditure respectively.
To spend this this money, the County is required by both the Constitution of Kenya 2010 and the Public Finance Management Act, 2012 to consult the citizens of the county to propose ways of using the budget.
The Youth Cafe will make sure participants can express their support for different spending levels, but also for the assumptions that drive the model. Based on input from young people, The Youth Cafe searches all the possible scenarios to find a profitable budget based on broadly supported assumptions and preferences.