Public finance is often described as the plumbing of government, quietly moving resources from treasuries to clinics, classrooms, and social protection programmes. But in many countries, those pipes are clogged: funds leak, arrive late, or never reach the services they were meant to support. Behind every blocked pipe is a real story a child turned away from a health facility, an overcrowded classroom, a family excluded from social protection.
During the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) PFM peer learning workshop in Rwanda, UNICEF’s Chief of Social Policy Dr. Gaby Guerrero emphasized that Digital Public Financial Management (PFM) is changing that story by turning invisible money into “visible money.” When budgets, payments, and reports move through digital systems, funds can be tracked end-to-end—from a national budget line all the way to a rural school or health facility. Leakages become harder to hide, delays are easier to spot, and governments can see, in real time, whether money is actually reaching the people it was meant to serve.
Kenya’s Research and Innovation Lead, Kipkorir Biegon, stated that Bajeti Yetu online budget portal opens up national and county budgets to public scrutiny, allowing citizens, journalists, and civil society to search, compare, and analyse spending. Electronic Social Intelligence Reporting (ESIR), an electronic social investment reporting system, links money to services at facility level, turning abstract figures into concrete improvements like better classrooms in Turkana County. Performance systems such as National Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation System (NIMES) and County Integrated Monitoring and Evaluation System (CIMES) connect budgets to results, helping decision-makers see which investments are truly changing lives.
These tools create four powerful accountability pathways: traceability, real-time monitoring, transparency, and oversight. Traceability follows every shilling along the chain, real-time dashboards reveal performance as it happens, transparency portals let the public see how money is used, and parliaments and citizens are better equipped to hold governments to account. The result is a shift from hidden sub-programmes and fragmented data to transparent, trackable, and child-sensitive investments.
Guerrero insists that digital PFM is not just about software, it is a governance reform, not an IT upgrade. Coding social priorities health, education, and social protection directly into budget structures ensures that children are not an afterthought but a starting point. Integrating core systems, from IFMIS to sector dashboards, means that if spending is not recorded digitally, it is effectively not accountable.
For other countries, the message is both simple and urgent: transparency first, or nothing else works. Systems must be designed to talk to each other, or accountability breaks. And investment must reach the last mile where budgets meet children in schools, clinics, and communities.
Digital PFM, done right, turns public finance from a dark, leaky maze into a clear, flowing network of accountable investments in human potential. When money becomes visible, children’s futures do too.
Dr. Yusuf Muchelule is a Senior Lecturer & a Consultant
