- Filipinos who want to know where public money goes can now turn to online tools that make government budgets, infrastructure projects, laws, and other public records easier to search and understand.
- BetterGov.PH, a volunteer-led civic technology movement, has developed platforms that help citizens examine proposed government spending, monitor public works, and access information that would otherwise require navigating scattered government documents and websites.
- The tools can be particularly useful when people want to scrutinize infrastructure spending, including flood-control projects. By making project information easier to find, they can help citizens identify projects worth checking and report possible problems to the appropriate agencies.
Filipinos who want to know where public money goes can now turn to online tools that make government budgets, infrastructure projects, laws, and other public records easier to search and understand.
BetterGov.PH, a volunteer-led civic technology movement, has developed platforms that help citizens examine proposed government spending, monitor public works, and access information that would otherwise require navigating scattered government documents and websites.
The tools can be particularly useful when people want to scrutinize infrastructure spending, including flood-control projects. By making project information easier to find, they can help citizens identify projects worth checking and report possible problems to the appropriate agencies.
Making government budgets easier to scrutinize
BetterGov.PH's Budget Portal makes the proposed 2027 national budget searchable line by line, covering 532,313 items. Users can also compare the proposal with the 2026 General Appropriations Act to examine changes in planned government spending.
The group's analysis found that the House of Representatives inserted 7,054 new projects worth ₱190 billion, deleted 1,881 projects worth ₱93 billion from the National Expenditure Program, increased 256 projects by a combined ₱7 billion, and reduced 277 projects by ₱91 billion.
These figures give citizens, journalists, and researchers a way to examine how proposed spending changes as the national budget moves through the legislative process.
Another tool, Bisto Proyekto, makes 266,516 government infrastructure projects searchable. Developed with TAPAT, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and the People's Budget Coalition, it also allows citizens to inspect public works and report their observations.
BetterGov.PH said 219 citizens have inspected 251 projects worth ₱13 billion across 12 regions. Of those inspected, 92 were rated unsatisfactory, and nine have since been corrected.
The platform's infrastructure records can help people identify projects for closer scrutiny, including flood-control works where covered by the available data. However, identifying a concern does not by itself establish wrongdoing, and reported issues still require appropriate verification and government action.
From public records to practical tools
BetterGov.PH also operates Juris.ph, which provides access to more than 50,000 Supreme Court decisions and over 10,000 Republic Acts, and BatasWatch, which tracks bills in the 20th Congress.
ScamCheck.ph helps users assess suspicious messages, while Petitions.ph lets citizens start and sign petitions. The group has also developed Kuya J, an AI assistant that answers questions about government services, laws, budgets, and public data in English, Filipino, and Taglish.
BetterGov.PH said its community has grown to more than 5,000 members, with over 500 contributors working on more than 50 projects since the movement began in 2025.
DICT opens Gov.PH development to public contributions
The group's work was highlighted during Philippine Civic Tech Week, held from October 12 to 18, 2026, which culminated in the BetterGov.PH Summit.
During the summit, Department of Information and Communications Technology Undersecretary David Almirol Jr. announced that the department's eGov team would collaborate with BetterGov.PH and Filipino open-source contributors to develop the official Gov.PH portal.
DICT also announced plans to open the Gov.PH GitHub repository and launch an information technology community group chat. The initiative is intended to let developers, designers, accessibility specialists, writers, and translators help inspect and improve the digital systems people use to reach government services.
Planned improvements include a unified design system and crowdsourced translations into Philippine languages.
Fellowship invites contributors to work on public problems
BetterGov.PH has also launched a three-month fellowship running from December 2026 to March 2027. The program will bring selected developers, designers, data specialists, researchers, students, and civic innovators together with government agencies and civil society organizations to develop practical solutions.
The pilot cohort has secured ₱450,000 in funding to be shared among selected fellows. Partners include the WeSolve Foundation, the Philippine Open Government Partnership, and the BetterGov.PH community, with support from a Mozilla Foundation grant.
The program will focus on six areas, namely budget and procurement, energy, health, education, infrastructure monitoring, and justice and accountability.
Proposed projects include integrating historical budget and procurement data into the Department of Budget and Management's COMPASS platform, publishing open energy data, improving access to local health information, and strengthening citizen reports on public infrastructure projects.
Other plans include linking school-level learning outcomes with budget data and developing a system to track corruption cases.
Applications are available at fellowship.bettergov.ph.
The initiatives aim to make public information easier to access and turn it into practical ways for citizens to participate in governance. BetterGov.PH also acknowledges that publishing data and opening digital platforms do not automatically resolve corruption or guarantee accountability.