Civic-tech group BudgIT has launched a digital platform, GovSpend.ng, to improve public access to federal government expenditure data and address longstanding transparency issues in Nigeria’s budget process.

GovSpend.ng was developed as an alternative interface to the Federal Government’s Open Treasury Portal (OTP), which was designed to disclose daily payments by ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs).

However, BudgIT says the OTP has faced challenges with usability, with many of its datasets being presented in formats that are not machine-readable or easily downloadable.

“The Federal Government has done a great job in ensuring that the government’s daily spendings are in the public domain. However, data on the portal are mostly in non-machine-readable formats and not downloadable. We developed the GovSpend.ng portal to rectify this issue,” said Gabriel Okeowo, BudgIT’s Country Director.

The platform aggregates and simplifies data from OTP, allowing users to search for payment records by MDA, flag irregularities, and explore trends across various sectors. Journalists, researchers, civil society organizations, and citizens can download the data and use it to monitor government transactions.

BudgIT said it analyzed over 165,000 transactions from 2020 to 2022 and identified several financial red flags. These included over ₦3.5 billion paid into private accounts, ₦773 million in transactions without descriptions, and more than ₦1 billion in questionable disbursements—many recorded at the end of fiscal months or involving suspicious vendor pricing.

In one example, the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta reportedly made payments running into hundreds of millions of naira to individuals labeled only as “stipends,” with little context or justification.

Folasayo Onigbinde, BudgIT’s Product Manager, said the platform was developed to promote transparency through data clarity. “The current format limits public engagement. GovSpend.ng was created to solve this, offering clean, searchable, and downloadable data in visual formats,” she said.

BudgIT says the tool will support evidence-based journalism, advocacy, and civic engagement, by helping the public hold government accountable for how funds are spent.

The organization has also urged community-based groups, civil society actors, and the media to make active use of the portal to track spending patterns and demand transparency from government institutions.