A/HRC/31/33 33. The universal periodic review mechanism of the Human Rights Council is an important tool in assisting States in investing in the realization of the rights of the child. At the twelfth session of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review, the Government of the Republic of Korea committed to prioritizing resource allocations for children Discussions at the session also led to the formation of an inter-embassy meeting group on children’s rights. Similarly, during the review of Zambia at the fourteenth session, the Government accepted recommendations on budget allocations for maternal and child health and investment in education in rural areas. The recommendations on the health budget indeed helped to strengthen national advocacy efforts, leading to an increase in the national health budget from 9.3 per cent in 2012 to 11.3 per cent in 2013. 26 34. In Bangladesh, the universal periodic review has boosted national advocacy for the Child Rights Act enacted by Parliament on 16 June 2013, two months after the review of Bangladesh by the Working Group at its sixteenth session. 27 In Pakistan, advocacy originating from the universal periodic review was instrumental in accelerating key legal and policy reforms that had been pending for years. In November 2012, one month after the fourteenth session of the Working Group, the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act was passed by the National Assembly, guaranteeing free education to all children aged from 5 to 16 years. The Government declared 2013 the year of child rights, thus providing further scope for civil society to push the Government to fulfil its commitments to children. VI. Transparency 35. Meaningful accountability is only possible when citizens – including children – and civil society have access to timely policy and fiscal information to support their informed engagement with budgetary processes. Nonetheless, the Open Budget Survey for 2015 reported that, in the 102 countries surveyed, only one-third of budget documents that should be available to the public were not produced, produced for internal use only or published too late to be useful. Of particular concern, the Governments of 16 countries even failed to publish a basic document describing proposed budget policies. 28 36. States should make national and subnational budget and spending documents public during their annual budget cycle in a timely manner. At the national level, this includes making public the pre-budget statement, the executive budget proposal, the enacted budget, in-year reports, a mid-year review, a year-end report and an audit report by the supreme audit institution. In Bangladesh, for example, local governments publish “citizens’ charters”, which include information on funds allocated in the local government budget to children’s programmes and social development. The charters are updated quarterly to reflect actual expenditure. 37. In Uganda, transparency has helped to bring about important increases in both the allocations to and the quality of spending in the education sector. In the mid-1990s, a public expenditure tracking survey was conducted by the Government and the World Bank to collect information from frontline education providers to gauge the extent to which grants actually made it to their intended destination. Through the collection of quantitative data and the publication of documents on allocations to schools, parents and children were able to monitor actual resource flows to schools. In less than a decade, the utilization by schools of government grants improved from 20 per cent to over 80 per cent, also implying a reduction in corruption. Systematic transparency was ensured by the publication of school 26 27 28 10 Save the Children, “Investment in Children – Investment in Everyone” (see footnote 22), pp. 20-21. Ibid., p. 21. International Budget Partnership, Open Budget Survey (see footnote 21), p. 2.