How Two Young Nigerians Turned a Hackathon Idea into Africa’s Most Consequential Fiscal Transparency Movement (2011–2026)

 

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 

In 2011, at the Co-Creation Hub in Yaba, Lagos, two young professionals — a bank strategy analyst named Oluseun Onigbinde and a software technologist named Joseph Agunbiade — entered a 48-hour “Tech-In Governance” hackathon with a deceptively simple idea: that Nigeria’s national budget, then an opaque document circulated among a narrow policy elite, could be broken down, visualised, and placed in the hands of ordinary citizens. Fifteen years later, the organisation born from that weekend — BudgIT — has grown into Africa’s foremost civic technology institution for fiscal transparency, operating in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal and the United States, tracking tens of thousands of public projects, publishing the continent’s most-cited subnational fiscal analysis, and signing formal partnerships with the very anti-corruption institutions it once pressured from the outside.

This special report examines BudgIT at fifteen: the aims and objectives that animated its founding, the extent to which those objectives have been met, its measurable contributions to Nigeria’s fiscal ecosystem, and the backgrounds of the two founders whose complementary skills — finance and data on one hand, software engineering on the other — made the enterprise possible. Our assessment is that BudgIT has substantially met, and in several respects exceeded, its founding objectives, even as the fiscal environment it monitors has grown more challenging, with Nigeria’s 2026 federal budget reaching a record ₦68.32 trillion and a deficit BudgIT itself calls unviable.

  ORIGINS: A HACKATHON IN YABA, 2011

 

BudgIT’s origin story is by now part of Nigerian civic-tech folklore. In 2011, the Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB) in Yaba — then the emerging nerve centre of Lagos’s technology ecosystem — issued an open call at its first Tech-In Governance competition for creative ideas capable of transforming citizen participation in governance. Onigbinde, at the time a Strategy and Corporate Development Officer at First Bank of Nigeria Plc, teamed up with Agunbiade, a product development lead at Silicon Harbour Investment Company, and together they sketched a platform for opening government spending data to public scrutiny. The concept won backing, and BudgIT formally launched operations in September 2011 from Yaba, Lagos.

The founding context mattered. Nigeria had returned to civilian rule in 1999, but the habits of the military era — informational opacity, discretionary spending, and a citizenry conditioned not to ask questions about public money — persisted. At the time of BudgIT’s founding, only about five of Nigeria’s 36 states published their budgets at all, and even routine requests for budget documents could invite intimidation. The budget itself was technically a public document, yet functionally inaccessible: dense, jargon-laden, and distributed in formats no ordinary citizen could interrogate. The founders’ insight was that the barrier to accountability was not merely the absence of data, but the absence of comprehension — and that design, storytelling and technology could close that gap.

“The barrier to accountability was not merely the absence of data, but the absence of comprehension.”

  AIMS AND OBJECTIVES AT FOUNDING

 

From its earliest public statements, BudgIT defined itself as a civic organisation that applies technology to intersect citizen engagement with institutional improvement, in order to facilitate societal change. Distilled from its founding documents, public mission statements and the founders’ own accounts, the organisation’s core objectives were:

• Simplification of public data. To break down Nigeria’s federal and state budgets into accessible infographics, plain-language summaries and interactive tools, so that any literate citizen could understand how public money was being allocated.
• Fiscal transparency as a norm. To raise the standard of transparency and accountability in government by making the publication of budgets, implementation reports and audit records an expected practice at federal, state and local levels.
• Citizen engagement and mobilisation. To move Nigerians from passive observers of governance to active participants — people who track projects in their communities, attend town halls, and demand service delivery from elected representatives.
• Institutional improvement. To engage constructively with government institutions — ministries, legislatures, anti-corruption agencies and fiscal commissions — so that transparency gains would be embedded in systems rather than dependent on episodic goodwill.
• Service delivery accountability. To connect budget lines to physical outcomes: schools built, boreholes sunk, clinics equipped — and to expose the gap where funds were released but projects never materialised.

  FIFTEEN YEARS ON: HAVE THE OBJECTIVES BEEN MET?

 

  Simplifying the Budget — Objective Substantially Met

On its founding objective, BudgIT’s success is difficult to dispute. Its infographics breaking down federal allocations have become a fixture of Nigerian public discourse, generating an estimated 40 million social media impressions annually, with over 200 million online impressions and some 10 million offline reaches recorded in its first decade. Its simplified versions of NNPC monthly reports alone have drawn at least 2.6 million impressions. When President Tinubu presented the record ₦68.32 trillion 2026 budget, BudgIT’s plain-language breakdown — ₦32.29 trillion for capital projects, ₦15.81 trillion for debt servicing — circulated within hours, framed in the organisation’s signature register: “That’s public money. Our money.” The organisation has also moved with the technology frontier, deploying Bimi AI, a conversational assistant giving citizens instant access to Nigeria’s fiscal and demographic data.

  Transparency as a Norm — Objective Largely Met, with Caveats

The transformation of the subnational transparency landscape is perhaps BudgIT’s most structurally significant achievement. From a baseline of roughly five states publishing budgets in 2011, all 36 states now release key fiscal documents, and nearly all publish quarterly Budget Implementation Reports aligned with the National Chart of Accounts — a shift BudgIT monitors through its Open States platform and its State Fiscal Transparency League ranking. The organisation is candid, however, that disclosure has outpaced quality: its most recent transparency assessment found only nine states — Anambra, Benue, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kebbi and Osun — achieving top scores, with outdated procurement portals, delayed reports and incomplete fiscal repositories still widespread. Transparency, as BudgIT itself argues, is strongest when citizens actually use the data — and usage remains the frontier.

  Citizen Engagement — Objective Met at Remarkable Scale

Through Tracka, its flagship service-delivery platform launched in 2014 and now a decade old, BudgIT has monitored more than 17,800 zonal intervention, federal, state and local government projects, recording over 3,500 documented success stories where citizen pressure led to project completion or remediation. The platform scaled from six pilot states in 2014 to 32 states, supported by 36 project tracking officers and roughly 1,500 community champions, facilitating some 15,000 town hall meetings and serving, by the organisation’s account, over 10 million Nigerians. The Tracka mobile app now allows any citizen to report a community need — a road, a school, water, a primary health centre — directly to elected leaders.

 Institutional Engagement — Objective Met, and Deepening in 2026

The most striking evidence that BudgIT has crossed from outside agitator to institutional partner came in February 2026, when the organisation signed back-to-back Memoranda of Understanding with two of Nigeria’s key fiscal integrity institutions. On February 18, 2026, it signed an MoU with the Fiscal Responsibility Commission in Abuja under the EU-funded SIPAC–RoLAC II project implemented by International IDEA; the following day, February 19, it formalised a partnership with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), with EFCC Chairman Ola Olukoyede emphasising that anti-corruption work must extend beyond prosecution to early risk detection at the budget and project implementation stages. Under the EFCC agreement, BudgIT will support preventive measures, enhance capital project monitoring, and apply data and technology to public resource management. Earlier institutional milestones include an open-budgeting MoU with the Ebonyi State Government and sustained engagement with the World Bank-supported SFTAS programme framework.

  Service Delivery Accountability — Objective Met, Battle Ongoing

BudgIT’s investigative output has repeatedly forced uncomfortable national conversations. Its analysis of the 2021 budget exposed over 316 duplicated capital projects worth ₦39.5 billion and highlighted the absence of audit records for ₦10.02 trillion received by the security sector between 2015 and 2021. Its most explosive recent finding came in May 2025, when it revealed that the National Assembly had inserted 11,122 projects worth ₦6.93 trillion into the 2025 budget — roughly 12.5 per cent of the entire appropriation — including 1,477 streetlight projects worth ₦393.29 billion, 538 boreholes worth ₦114.53 billion, 2,122 ICT projects valued at ₦505.79 billion, and ₦6.74 billion for the “empowerment of traditional rulers.” Country Director Gabriel Okeowo called the insertions “an assault on fiscal responsibility,” and the organisation formally urged the Attorney General to seek Supreme Court interpretation of the National Assembly’s appropriation powers. It should be noted that the National Assembly and officials in the budget ministry have pushed back, maintaining that the 1999 Constitution confers appropriation powers on the legislature; the constitutional question remains unresolved.

  THE POSITIVES: BUDGIT’S CONTRIBUTION TO     NIGERIA’S FISCAL WORLD

 

Assessed across fifteen years, BudgIT’s positive contributions to the Nigerian fiscal ecosystem can be grouped under six headings:

• A permanent transparency infrastructure. Platforms such as Tracka (community project tracking), GovSpend (monitoring actual federal releases to MDAs, contract recipients and Treasury Single Account outflows), Open States, PHCTracka (primary healthcare monitoring) and the State of States dashboard constitute standing public utilities that outlive any single news cycle or administration.
• The authoritative subnational fiscal benchmark. The annual State of States report, now in its tenth edition, has become the reference document for governors, investors, journalists and development partners assessing state-level fiscal health. The 2025 edition documented recurrent revenue across 35 assessed states rising from ₦8.66 trillion in 2023 to ₦14.4 trillion in 2024 — a 66.28 per cent surge — while flagging rising expenditure and debt overhang. Notably, the organisation has publicly acknowledged its own methodological limitations and committed to measuring service-delivery quality, not merely fiscal space — a rare instance of institutional self-correction in the sector.
• A watchdog function with teeth. From duplicated projects to legislative insertions to unaudited security spending, BudgIT’s forensic budget analyses have repeatedly set the national agenda, drawn responses from the Presidency and National Assembly, and armed anti-corruption agencies, journalists and civil society with actionable data.
• Honest scrutiny of fiscal realism. BudgIT has consistently interrogated headline budget figures. On the 2026 budget, it has argued that the ₦36.9 trillion revenue projection is unrealistic given oil dependence and uncertain tax reform gains, leaving a ₦31.5 trillion deficit — 6.4 per cent of GDP, more than double the 3 per cent ceiling in the Fiscal Responsibility Act — with only 53.9 per cent of spending financeable from actual revenue. It has likewise pressed the principle that budget performance be measured by releases and implementation, not appropriations.
• A pan-African export of Nigerian civic innovation. BudgIT has expanded to five countries beyond Nigeria — Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Senegal and the United States — and through initiatives such as the Joinbodi cohort has incubated dozens of smaller civil society organisations, multiplying the sector’s capacity.
• Norm change in citizen expectations. Perhaps least measurable but most profound: a generation of Nigerians now expects to see the budget, question it, and track its execution. The vocabulary of appropriation, releases, capital versus recurrent expenditure and constituency projects has entered mainstream discourse in large part through BudgIT’s popularisation.

  THE FOUNDERS

 

  Oluseun Onigbinde — The Strategist

Born on September 18, 1985 in Osogbo, Osun State, Oluseun Onigbinde was educated at Loyola College, Ibadan, before earning a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical/Electronics Engineering from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta. He later completed the Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and was a pioneer Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University. His professional career began at First Bank of Nigeria Plc as a Strategy and Corporate Development Officer — an experience that exposed him to the analytical value of public data, and particularly the Nigerian budget, planting the seed for BudgIT.

As co-founder and, today, Global Director of BudgIT, Onigbinde pioneered what he has called “factivism” — the blend of data, design and digital media in service of civic advocacy — reaching, by the World Economic Forum’s account, over 20 million citizens. His honours include the Ashoka Fellowship, the Future Awards Prize for Science and Tech Innovation (2012), the Quartz Africa 30 Innovators Award, the Aspen New Voices Fellowship, the Archbishop Tutu Fellowship, and recognition among The Africa Report’s 100 most influential Africans. In September 2019 he was appointed Technical Adviser to Nigeria’s Ministry of Budget and National Planning — an appointment that proved controversial among some government critics, and a period around which he took a nine-month operational break from BudgIT. In 2026 he remains the organisation’s global public face, speaking on AI and civic accountability at international fora including the SBCC Summit in Panama.

  Joseph Agunbiade — The Technologist

If Onigbinde supplied the fiscal fluency, Joseph Agunbiade supplied the machinery. A technology entrepreneur holding a B.Tech in Physics with Electronics, Agunbiade is an alumnus of the MIT Innovation Bootcamp and holds advanced Product Management certification from General Assembly in San Francisco. Before BudgIT, he headed Product Development and Management at Silicon Harbour Investment Company and founded Getmobile Technologies Limited, a software agency building enterprise systems, government solutions and payment platforms. As BudgIT’s co-founder and long-serving Chief Technology Officer, he architected the platforms that turned advocacy into infrastructure.

Agunbiade’s post-BudgIT ventures reflect a consistent thread of technology-for-development: Univelcity, the Lagos tech school he founded in 2016 that trains young Nigerians in software development, data science, AI and product design before connecting them to jobs; SmartED, a gamified digital learning platform for the Nigerian school curriculum; Skillup Africa, an impact-investment platform co-founded with Nkemdilim Uwaje Begho to finance tech training through student loans; and Resolute4.0, a technology strategy venture for volatile communities. He continues to serve on BudgIT’s board, and volunteers annually teaching Nigerian children to code.

The partnership’s durability owes much to its complementarity: a banker who could read a budget and a builder who could ship a product. Institutional continuity has since been reinforced by a professional leadership bench, including Country Director Gabriel Okeowo and Deputy Country Director Vahyala Kwaga, who signed the 2026 EFCC and FRC agreements on the organisation’s behalf.

  FUNDING AND SUSTAINABILITY

 

BudgIT’s early growth was catalysed by seed support from Co-Creation Hub and a landmark $400,000 investment from the Omidyar Network in 2014. Over the years its work has been backed by the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations and Luminate, alongside programme-specific funding such as the European Union’s support for the SIPAC–RoLAC II anti-corruption partnerships. Its original for-profit data arm was spun off as Fitila Africa under independent management — a structural separation that preserved the foundation’s civic character.

  THE ATLANTIC DIGEST’S ASSESSMENT

 

Fifteen years is long enough to judge an institution by results rather than intentions. On the evidence, BudgIT has met its founding objectives to a degree few civic organisations anywhere achieve: it set out to simplify the budget, and its infographics now reach tens of millions; it set out to normalise transparency, and budget publication has gone from five states to thirty-six; it set out to mobilise citizens, and ten million have engaged through Tracka alone; it set out to improve institutions, and in 2026 it sits across the table from the EFCC and the Fiscal Responsibility Commission as a formal partner.

Yet the organisation’s own analysis is the best argument that its work is unfinished. A record ₦68.32 trillion budget financed nearly half by borrowing; ₦6.93 trillion in legislative insertions in a single fiscal year; chronic revenue underperformance exceeding 30 per cent of targets; and a persistent gap between appropriation and implementation — these are the conditions BudgIT was built to confront, and they have grown in scale even as transparency has improved. The paradox of BudgIT at fifteen is that it has won the argument for transparency while the battle for accountability — for public money translating into public goods — remains very much alive. That, more than any anniversary, is the measure of why the next fifteen years matter.

BudgIT has won the argument for transparency; the battle for accountability remains alive.