BudgIT turns 15 as co-founder recalls how one Lagos question became Africa’s civic-finance watchdog

Civic-tech co-founder Olúṣeun Onìgbìndé marked BudgIT’s 15th anniversary on Sunday with a personal reflection on how a question asked in a small Lagos room became one of Africa’s most influential public-finance organisations.

In a widely shared post quoting BudgIT’s official anniversary message, Onìgbìndé said the organization began with a simple problem, which is, budgets that decide whether a child gets a classroom or a clinic gets drugs were written in a language only a handful of people could read.

“That question became BudgIT,” he wrote. “We had no money and no proof that any of it would work. What we had was a conviction that public money belongs to the public, and that citizens deserve to see it in plain language.”

BudgIT was founded in 2011 by Onìgbìndé and Joseph Agunbiade after a Tech-in-Governance hackathon at Co-Creation Hub in Yaba, Lagos. The idea was to turn opaque government budgets into visual, understandable information ordinary citizens could use.

Fifteen years later, the group operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal, with a U.S. office in Washington, D.C.

It has built tools including Tracka for community project monitoring, GovSpend for tracking expenditure, Open States and State of States reports, and more recently an AI assistant, BIMI.

According to anniversary figures released by the organisation, BudgIT says it has reached more than 22 million people with budget and spending information, tracked more than 19,600 public projects valued at about ₦8.5 trillion across 7,589 communities, and helped complete more than 11,800 projects worth about ₦3.5 trillion through town halls and citizen monitoring.

Also, the organization said it helped move Nigeria from three states publishing budgets in 2014 to all 36 states, and supported media investigations that flagged more than ₦250 billion in potentially wasteful spending via GovSpend.

Onìgbìndé said the organisation’s proudest achievement is not a single report, but a cultural shift, where budget conversations are moving from technical rooms into newsrooms, classrooms, town halls and social media.

“A generation of young citizens now treats fiscal accountability as ordinary civic behaviour. That shift is the real product,” he wrote.

He also listed unfinished work. Debt service still crowds out development spending, many subnational budgets still “reveal less than they hide,” and money still leaks at the last mile, where citizens feel it most.

“Fifteen years in, transparency alone is not enough,” he said. “We continue to persist in service to our communities.”

For Onìgbìndé, the milestone was both celebration and reminder. The first budget visuals, he said, were built “on borrowed time and stubborn hope.”

Fifteen years later, the organisation is larger, more regional and more institutional but the original question remains: who gets to understand, and challenge, how public money is spent?