Tuesday March 19th, 2024
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Mwazna Reveals Details of Egypt's Government Spending

From the makers of the 'Morsi Meter' comes an interactive and highly-visual new site designed to inform the average Egyptian of where exactly the country's budget is being spent.

Staff Writer

Speaking at the inauguration of the Economic Conference last month, El-Sisi hit the point of fiscal clarity in his speech, adamant that the days of cronyism and corrupt elitism is over; that the government will be adopting clear-cut policies that guarantee equality of chances within the framework of transparency and rule of law. Well, from the creators of the Morsi Meter, web developer and hacker Amr Sobhy and data scientist Tarek Amr comes Mwazna ('Budget' in Arabic), a new website which hopes to act as a proxy for said economic transparency during Sisi's reign and, like the Morsi Meter, assessing his accountability. Their tagline is “an attempt to explain and visualise the government budget for everyone.”

The site aims to inform and educate the Egyptian public on just how their hard earned money is being spent by the government with a super easy to use, graphic based, English and Arabic display.

Their idea and consequential collaboration came about after attending an international hackathon earlier this year that focused on the idea of open data.

Sobhy told Quartz “the details of where Egypt’s money comes from and where it goes is not entirely due to a lack of data, but that the existing data is not open or reusable.”

“There’s not enough comprehensive data publicly shared by the government in an open format and the process is not standardized. If you are lucky you end up with some PDFs and PowerPoint presentations,” added Sobhy.

Whilst the information on government spending may be around, the data has never been machine readable and must be sifted through manually. The site is in its fledgling stage without the resources available to become 100% comprehensive just yet, but it will be interesting to see how the average Egyptian will react to information that was previously shrouded in vagueness.

First the website takes you through the country's budgets exhibiting a 30% deficit with most tax revenue going towards various subsidies. With an interactive graph you can also see the how much exactly is being spent on different areas of government expenditure with the largest amounts going towards 'public services' and 'social protection'. The investment tab shows how much money is going into which areas in Egypt whilst you can also browse through national debt figures and individual expenditure.

Visit www.mwazna.com