Budget transparency is more than making documents publicly available. It is about ensuring that budget information can be accessed, understood, analysed, and used to improve decision-making. Through its Budget In Africa (BiA) platform, CABRI has spent years building one of the continent’s most comprehensive repositories of budget information, housing over 3,000 budget documents.
Yet a key challenge remained. While budget documents were available, extracting meaningful insights from thousands of pages of complex fiscal information required significant time and technical capacity. At the same time, the persistent gaps between approved budgets and actual spending continued to affect public investment, project implementation, and service delivery across many countries. Limited analysis of the causes of budget deviations further constrained efforts to improve budget performance.
Recognising these challenges, CABRI set out to transform the Budgets in Africa platform from a static repository of budget documents into a platform for evidence generation and peer learning. By integrating AI-supported data extraction, analysis, and visualisation tools. CABRI began to unlock valuable insights from budget information, providing stakeholders with a clearer understanding of fiscal policies and emerging trends across African countries.
As a pilot, CABRI extracted and analysed budget information from 397 government budget documents covering over 50,000 pages across five African countries: South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, and the Central African Republic. The documents available in both English and French were processed using AI-supported extraction tools that captured key budget indicators and converted them into a structured analytics-ready dataset. The extraction process generated 367 structured data points with source attribution and confidence metrics, achieving 87% coverage across the targeted indicators. At the same time, the automated process reduced manual effort by more than 95% while maintaining full traceability through page-level source attribution for every extracted value.
This innovation marked an important step in CABRI’s transition of the BiA from a knowledge repository to an evidence-generation platform. It enabled structured datasets to be developed for analysing how resources are allocated and utilised, generating insights into spending trends, budget priorities, and execution patterns across countries, and creating opportunities for comparative learning and a deeper understanding of fiscal governance challenges. This solution eliminates the bottleneck of manual data extraction while maintaining the rigour and transparency required for policy and research analysis.
The pilot also revealed important lessons. Extraction accuracy varied across languages, with stronger performance observed in English-language documents than in some francophone budget documents. Data gaps also emerged, particularly around actual expenditure information and differences in how sectors such as agriculture are defined and reported across countries. In some cases, agriculture spending included forestry and fisheries, while in others it was limited to the Ministry of Agriculture budget. These differences highlighted the importance of standardising definitions and working closely with countries to improve comparability. These lessons are helping shape the next phase of the initiative. CABRI is strengthening quality assurance processes, refining extraction methodologies, validating datasets with countries, and improving approaches for handling inconsistencies across data sources.
This work demonstrates how emerging technology can transform large volumes of complex budget information into practical evidence for decision-making. Governments can use these insights to compare their expenditure practices with those of other countries and adopt good practices to strengthen public financial management (PFM) reform and strengthen budget performance. Researchers and development partners can undertake a deeper analysis. Civil society organisations and citizens can better understand how public resources are being allocated and spent, and push for better use of public funds.
By turning thousands of pages of budget documents into actionable evidence, CABRI is helping bridge the gap between budget transparency and better fiscal outcomes across Africa, thereby promoting effective and efficient government service delivery, bolstering budget implementation, and fostering greater accountability.
To explore insights generated from the BiA platform, visit here to access the CABRI Budgets in Africa Brief series.