For the first time in Moldova, the planned budgets of 1,300 national schools are available online. In a news conference, the Ministry of Education, in cooperation with the Independent Analytical Center “Expert-Grup”, launched a new section on www.budgetstories.md, called “2014 School budget”. Any visitor of the website can now see how many financial resources an education intuition has and how much money is allocated for a student, IPN reports.

The new section on www.budgetstories.md contains information about how the money was managed the previous year and what investments were made in the infrastructure of the education institutions in this period. The data are presented at district and school levels. The users of the website can also find out information about the type of investments, such as the replacement of doors and windows, the extensive repair of the roof or purchase of information technology for the school. The platform also enables to interactively compare the budgets of schools.

Minister of Education Maia Sandu said the informal funds, such as the class fund, will not be published on the website. She called on the directors of education institutions to discuss the problems they face in public and to cooperate with the Government’s agencies. “We will manage to reduce informal payments when we allocate sufficient financial resources from the state funds,” she stated in the news conference.

The event was organized within the project “Facilitation of people’s participation in a responsible education reform and in the improvement of quality of education in Moldova” (“My School”). The project is implemented with the financial support of the World Bank (Global Partnership for Social Accountability).