Less taxing on your brain

A website created through an ambitious collaboration helps people navigate information about the national budget easily

What did you take away from the budget speech last week? Probably the Vat and fuel levy hikes, the proposal for the funding of free education or the belowinflation adjustments to personal income tax brackets. And sin taxes always grab headlines.

But unless it’s your job or per- sonal passion to delve into the details of the budget, the sheer magnitude of data it contains can be overwhelming.

A new portal could significantly change that experience. Enter vulekamali.gov.za, developed by Openup (previously Code for SA). The project is the result of a collaboration between national treasury and civil society organisation coalition Imali Yethu.

It aims to make the budget data — information about the way SA spends public money — more accessible.

The portal soft-launched a few weeks ago, providing budget data from previous years, and was then updated to include the 2018/2019 budget info in the days after former finance minister Malusi Gigaba delivered his speech.

It is an ambitious project, and frankly quite cool if you’re a data geek. But its relevance takes it beyond that niche. It’s the second such project from treasury, which launched municipalmoney.gov.za last year. Now provincial and national information can be found on the Vulekamali website.

Treasury already publishes much of its information on its own main site (treasury.gov.za), but has found that it largely goes unnoticed. The site is not only quite tough to navigate, but much of the information is in a format that is not very useable, such as PDFS.

The Vulekamali site, on the other hand, is built with citizen users in mind, offering sections such as “budget highlights”, “tax pocket guide” and “estimates of national expenditure” on the front page.

The budget for each of the national and provincial departments has its own section, so if you want access to, for example, a spreadsheet of how the economic development department apportioned its pennies, it is there for downloading.

If you prefer not to be bogged down by the specifics, you can scroll to the summary of spending (a bar graph), which is broken down by category of spend on each subpage.

A learning centre page offers a glossary of terms, as well as further resources, which are quite sparse but promise to grow.

Under “contributed data” you’ll