The Centre for Investigative Reporting (CIN), in partnership with the Centre for Research and Studies – GEA in Banja Luka and the citizens’ association Futura in Mostar, has developed a web platform featuring a database that brings together local government budget documents.
The database contains more than 350 budgets, revised budgets and draft budgets sourced from publicly available records covering 138 municipalities across Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) between the beginning of 2023 and the end of 2025. The data will be regularly updated.
The platform also features an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that allows citizens to quickly find answers to questions about local budgets through a chatbox. The AI analyses the budget data by category and can provide answers within seconds, including total spending for one or more municipalities, expenditure on specific areas such as education and healthcare, allocations in revised budgets, and comparisons of spending between municipalities.
Each answer comes with links to the relevant source documents, allowing users to check the information for themselves.
The database can be searched by year, municipality or sector, while charts help users make sense of the scale and distribution of spending. All data available on the platform can also be downloaded in a range of formats.
The platform is intended as a comprehensive online resource that gives citizens and civil society organisations easier access to public budget data and helps them analyse and understand how public money is allocated and spent across Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was developed as part of theLENS – Strengthening Civil Society Organisations’ Capacity to Monitor Public Budgets project, with the support of the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
