Transparency International Slovensko (TIS), an NGO dedicated to openness in public life, officially launched a website providing information about state subsidies to sports and culture on Wednesday, August 31. The site’s address is granty.transparency.sk. The site allows people to browse more than 30,000 grants or contributions worth almost €350 million allocated by the Ministries of Education and Culture, the Audiovisual Fund and the Cabinet Office between 2004 and 2010.
According to TIS, the departments of education and culture each year spend some €60 million on sport and culture subsidies but information about these is scant. "It is simply impossible to find on the websites of the ministries how many subsidies government institutions handed out, and for what purpose. Slovakia thus currently lacks a centralised database of allocated subsidies," said Matej Kurian of TIS, as reported by the SITA newswire.
More than one-fifth of data were not accessible in digital format before they became part of the project, TIS said. The new website provides automatically generated analyses 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 the most generous subsidies, for example to publish a youth magazine or to support a specific sport.
TIS said that the portal was the first step towards a higher-quality discussion about the purpose of donations and their effectiveness in various subsidy schemes. The project was supported by the Open Society Institute. Its source data and source code will be freely available to anyone interested and also to state institutions for non-commercial use.
Source: SITA
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
