Improving Budget Accountability in Water and Sanitation provision in the 2 Poorest Kinshasa District One of the major issues that cut across DRC’s society is weak and unresponsive governance structures. A key instrument to understanding the quality of governance structures in DRC is the current government budget process which reveal that citizens have no understanding of what the state is committing itself to through its policy declarations and what it actually does in its budgetary allocations. The extremely complicated and technical nature of the budget-making process and documents do not allow citizens to participate, to input or to monitor the process. These challenges have aggravated corruption and wasted public funds.
In January 2015, with financial support from CAFOD and the FCO (Foreign Commonwealth Office –British Embassy in DRC), the Centre d’Action pour Dirigeants et Cadre d’Entreprise au Congo (CADICEC) worked with the Association des Ami(e)s du Père Tony (ASAPT) to initiate Initiative pour la Transparence Budgétaire au Congo (ITBC). This long-term initiative sought to create an alliance of civil society organisations in the country around budget monitoring and advocacy for strengthening governance accountability. The initiative began in Kinshasa province and for more information visit: www.itbcongo.org 
In the first stage (January –June 2015), CADICEC and ASAPT identified twenty faith based groups and civil society organisations which wished to join this collaborative initiative. Another aspect of the initiative was to build a collective understanding of the scope, objectives, methodology of the work and examining budget making, analysis and advocacy in the context. 100 key religious, civil society and government leaders were trained on participative budget making and the role of new information technology in promoting transparency in budget processes. The second stage (July –December 2015) provided advanced training on budget policy, monitoring and evaluation of 50 staff selected from CSOs partners in Kinshasa province. A five-day workshop was conducted (at Loyola Jesuit Center Kinshasa, 1-5 December, 2015) to provide advanced training to staff from organisations across the province. At the end of the training participants developed action plans with specific budget analysis and monitoring initiatives they planned to implement during 2016 in the following sectors: education, health, mining, water and sanitation. 
This initiative intends to move this project into its third stage and will focus on water and sanitation sector. The project scale and ambition is to improve water and sanitation governance and provision through increased public access to budget information and citizens' empowerment on budget tracking in the 2 Poorest Districts of Kinshasa Province. The initiative’s goal is to increase public access to budget information and encourage the demand for disclosure of financial information by actively engaging citizens and soliciting their feedback. This will be achieved by implementing three components that are geared towards: 1) fostering an enabling environment for constructive engagement between government and civil society by strengthening capacity of ITBC network of civil society organizations and women groups to coordinate and implement budget analyses in the water and sanitation sector, 2) empowering the ITBC network of civil society organizations and women and youth groups on budget advocacy to engage the district authority and provincial parliament on the need for improvement of the water and sanitation sector budget,  and 3) collecting data and curating knowledge to improve project design and leveraging media support to disseminate lessons learned in a provincial and national scale. 
The need for this initiative is significant due to poor households’ water and sanitation conditions in target districts, reduced attention to the water and sanitation sector in the provincial budget (around 1% in the 2016 budget) and poor local people’s limited understanding of what the state is committing itself to in its policy declarations and what it actually does in its budgetary allocations. The last decade has seen a number of efforts by government and civil society to accelerate the coverage and quality of basic water and sanitation facilities in DRC. However, sector players, including civil society, have paid less attention to budget allocation and management issues and the actual governance of water and sanitation services.   For some people and particularly women and youth in this region, the water crisis means having to walk long distances every day to fetch enough drinking water - clean or unclean - just to get by. For others, it means suffering from malnutrition or disease caused by inadequate sanitation. Many people suffer these hardships due to lack or mismanagement of funds or inadequate knowledge of how to solve local water use and allocation problems. In 2015, the DRC officially became more devolved last year – with new provinces in many regions. Hence there is more potential for this kind of work in DRC in future which is another reason the project is relevant.