BRATISLAVA, August 31, (WEBNOVINY) — The NGO Transparency International Slovensko (TIS) has officially launched a portal informing about state subsidies destined for sports and culture on Wednesday. The address is http://granty.transparency.sk. It makes it possible to browse through over 30,000 grants or contributions worth almost EUR 350 million allocated by Ministries of Education and Culture, the Audiovisual Fund or the Cabinet Office in 2004-2010.
As TIS says, departments of education and culture spent annually some EUR 60 million for subsidies in sports and culture, which approximately amounts to the annual budget of the eastern Slovak town of Presov with 90,000 inhabitants but informing on them is poor. “It is simply impossible to find on websites of the ministries how many subsidies and for what purpose the government institutions handed out. Slovakia thus currently lacks a centralized database of allocated subsidies,” said Matej Kurian of TIS. More than one-fifth of data had not been accessible in digital format before they became part of the project.
The portal of TIS provides automatically generated analytical contributions according to the area where the support went, the applicant or the donor. This makes it possible to compare the sum of contributions or learn who gets most generous subsidies for example to publish a youth magazine or to support youth sports. TIS believes that the portal is the first step to a higher-quality discussion on purposes of the donations and their effectiveness in various subsidy schemes.
The project was supported by the Open Society Institute while its source data and the application code will be freely accessible to people interested and also to state institutions for non-commercial use.
SITA
