Category Archives: Donor Aid

The era of accountability has arrived: Warren Krafchik’s speech at the Open Government Partnership in Brasilia

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Warren Krafchik is a co-chair of the  Open Government Partnership (OGP) and director of the International Budget Partnership. This speech was delivered at the first annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership  in Brasilia on April 17, 2012

Welcome

Distinguished participants – I am honored to be here.

Introduction

Last year, I was sitting next to a woman – let’s call her Lydia – on a bus ride through rural Uganda when, suddenly, she called out: “Look at that school. It has a new roof now because the community complained about the previous one.” Several miles later, she cried out again, “Now look at this bridge! The public contractors used an inferior cement mix.”

I asked her if she was from the office of public works. “No,” she said proudly, “I have been trained as a community budget monitor. It has changed my life. When I take the kids to school, I monitor. At my village clinic, I monitor. I’m always looking, asking questions, reporting problems. I make sure the government does not waste my money.”

Lydia’s role grew out of a partnership between government and civil society that tracks public money from the central government to local governments – and that has greatly reduced public corruption.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need more Lydias – all over the world. They have a better sense of what their villages need and how to deliver it than people in far-away capitals.

We need them not only to monitor public resources, but to help develop and execute solutions to poverty and inequality.

The era of accountability has arrived.

Over the past decade, we have seen a powerful global civil society movement for open government emerge, with citizens, independent organizations, and the media leading campaigns for public access to information, for natural resource revenue transparency, and for opening budget and aid decisions to public scrutiny.

These campaigns have often succeeded where civil society and champions in government work together. This kind of collaboration is the core of the Open Government Partnership vision.

Transparency and participation

Making OGP partnerships work will depend on public information and public participation – both of which can be boosted through technology.

Lydia couldn’t hold Uganda’s government accountable if the government did not make timely public information available and accessible.

But, that’s not enough. Greater access to information must come with participation opportunities so that citizens and civil society organizations can use it to improve accountability.

OGP countries have committed to working with civil society organizations on developing and implementing country action plans. These commitments must be fully realized, and we will hear about the progress so far over the next two days.  We can learn from:

  • Indonesia, which brought the major civil society federations into a forum as partners in developing the first action plan.
  •  Mexico, which is reaching widely into civil society by enabling multi-stakeholder negotiating forums for each commitment.

But, we must go further by integrating participation opportunities into the action plans themselves. For example,

  • In Brazil, a massive national consultation is planned to ignite a dialogue on transparency and accountability.
  • In the Philippines, action plans include citizen audits and participatory budgeting at the national level.
  • Tanzania’s plans enable citizens to give feedback on service delivery and other critical issues with a guaranteed response time from government.

Effective, meaningful participation can produce better policy choices and a more efficient implementation of those policies.

But, what is even more exciting:

Participation energizes citizens, turning them into vital actors in shaping their countries’ future. It knits them into the fabric of governance, and recognizes the important role that their knowledge and skills can play.

Lydia proudly told me that being a citizen monitor has, quote, “changed my life.” The more Lydias we can engage, the more they can help change the lives of their countries.

This won’t be easy

But, these benefits won’t be easy to achieve.

Governments generally do not have extensive experience in engaging citizens between elections.

Governments will not necessarily get their action plans right the first time, and they will need to admit and correct their mistakes.

CSOs will need to recalibrate their relationships with governments.

They have to become allies of government in this venture, while retaining the right to be independent and critical.

They will also face the challenge of reaching deeply into civil society, well beyond the organizations in this room.

The payoffs

So the challenges are great, but imagine what we can do if we succeed.

We have a critical decision to make. We can continue to conduct governance and development as we have for decades, or we can take a different path.

The issue is whether we continue to see ourselves as opposing actors, or we see development as a partnership – where success depends on the knowledge and capacity of all of us.

OGP is about this fundamentally new vision. Through it, we can create the victories and relationships that boost development and build a new approach to public policy and governance. (Our work can be the defining initiative of a generation.)

OGP already covers more than a quarter of the world’s population. Together, we can improve the lives of millions of people.

Let’s get to it.

Thank you.

1st Annual Meeting of the Open Government Partnership Kicks Off Today

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TRANSPARENCY!  ACCOUNTABILITY!  CITIZEN EMPOWERMENT!

First Annual Meeting of the Open Government Partnership Kicks Off Today

What: Government and civil society representatives from 53 countries around the world, including the International Budget Partnership, will meet in Brasilia for the first annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership – a new global initiative that brings together government, civil society, donors, and the private sector to promote transparent, effective, and accountable governments – with institutions that empower citizens and are responsive to their needs and aspirations. 

A special highlight is the speech by OGP co-chair & IBP director Warren Krafchik’s at 10:15am (U.S.A. Eastern Time). Watch it as it happens – details below.

When: Tuesday, 17 April 2011, 9:30 a.m. (Brazil)/12:30 p.m. (UTC/GMT)/08:30a.m. (U.S.A. Eastern Time)

PARTICIPATE VIRTUALLY
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is providing a number of interactive online platforms to open the discussion to all.

Follow the proceedings live: From the speeches given by world leaders to the panel discussions with open government practitioners, all of the activities during OGP Annual Meeting 2012 will be available from anywhere in the world. The entire event will be broadcast live on the web at http://www.opengovpartnership.org/Brasilia2012.

Register and join the discussion: Alongside the webcast, the OGP will host a live chat where visitors can post comments directly. Tweets and Facebook updates discussing theOGP meeting will also be viewable in the chat (be sure to use hashtag #OGP2012 on Twitter). To join the discussion, you need to register here.

The world post-Busan: what’s in it for CSOs working on aid, transparency and accountability?

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prepared by Paolo de Renzio, Senior Research Fellow at the International Budget Partnership

After a gruelling 35-hour flight, it took me a few days to recover and digest all that had happened in Busan last week, where more than 2,000 delegates gathered for the 4th High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. Overall, I thought that the outcome was fairly disappointing. The outcome document, called the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, is long on principles and short of commitments. It was endorsed by the emerging donors like Brazil, Russia, India, China on condition that it is not binding. Specific and time-bound targets for improving donor performance, such as those agreed in Paris in 2005, are absent. And all details about the new and more inclusive body expected to oversee the implementation of the document’s commitments are lacking, though a deadline of June 2012 for its establishment was set.

But not all is bleak. The document contains strong language on the need to promote democratic ownership of development policies and processes, and recognizes the vital role played by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in “enabling people to claim their rights, in promoting rights-based approaches, in shaping development policies and partnerships, and in overseeing their implementation”. It also retained the commitments related to improving aid transparency, including a deadline of December 2015 for implementing a common open standard for the publication of comprehensive information on aid flows. In fact, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which was undermined by reluctant donors in the run-up to Busan, got a strong boost with the US Government joining it, alongside other large donors such as the Asian and Inter-American Development Banks. This means that more than  75% of information of total aid flows will soon be compliant with strong transparency standards. This will allow CSOs in both donor and recipient countries to track more closely how aid money is spent.

Donors also committed to using country systems as a default approach for development cooperation, something that could strongly enhance the link between aid and budget transparency, and to further untie their aid. Finally, the document talks about the importance of fiscal transparency in combating corruption, and about the need to “establish transparent public financial management and aid information management systems, and strengthen the capacities of all relevant stakeholders to make better use of this information in decision-making and to promote accountability”.

The results of the Busan HLF4 therefore create a reasonable framework to push forward issues that are of core interest to CSOs working on transparency and accountability. Yet, much remains to be done. In order to fully exploit the opportunities opened at Busan, the International Budget Partnership will work with others to:

  1. Monitor and influence negotiations on the establishment of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, ensuring that it adequately includes and addresses transparency and accountability issues (focusing particularly on aid and budget transparency, and use of country systems), with monitorable indicators and time-bound commitments.
  2. Work with the IATI Secretariat to ensure that aid information is increasingly compatible with recipient country budget systems and processes.
  3. Continue discussions on enhancing the linkages between aid and fiscal transparency with the smaller set of actors who were part of the Transparency Building Block at Busan, and who are committed to further and faster progress in this area.

If you are interested in joining, let us know!

How we will promote aid and budget transparency in Busan

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prepared by Paolo de Renzio, Senior Research Fellow at the International Budget Partnership

Open Budget Surveys have repeatedly found that countries that are heavily dependent on foreign aid to finance their budgets tend to have less transparent budget processes, . This might be due to various country characteristics, such as low incomes or weak democratic institutions. But donor behaviour also plays a part, as argued in a recent IBP Briefing Note. The brief highlights the importance of the relationship between donors’ provision of information on aid flows and recipient country governments’ disclosure of budget information to their citizens. In fact, aid transparency and budget transparency are inextricably linked. Budgets in partner countries cannot be made fully transparent without improved aid transparency. Only if donors provide partner countries with sufficient information, compatible with partner country budget systems and schedules, can timely, accurate and comprehensive budget information be made available to citizens of countries receiving aid. This point is also highlighted in the the Dar es Salaam Declaration on Budget Transparency, Accountability and Participation, signed last week by nearly 100 civil society groups.

At the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which will take place in a few days in Busan, South Korea, the transparency theme will have a prominent place. The latest draft of the Busan Outcome Document (the declaration that participating governments will sign at the end of the Forum) covers transparency issues in a number of ways. First, transparency and accountability are recognized as ‘shared principles’ that form the foundation of development cooperation, alongside ownership, results and inclusive partnerships. Second, a whole paragraph (para 22) is devoted to aid transparency commitments, in which donor agencies undertake to make publicly available more information on aid flows, and to implement a common standard for its publication, building among other things on the efforts of the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Third, donors and recipient countries commit to building more transparent public financial management systems and to improving fiscal transparency.

All of these commitments were the outcome of some difficult negotiations, facing resistance from a number of donor governments, including China, Japan and France. Provided they make it through the final discussions, they are very welcome, and represent a significant step forward in recognizing the importance of transparency and accountability as key ingredients of both aid and development effectiveness. The explicit link between aid transparency and budget transparency, however, is not recognized. Luckily, this link will be the focus of a plenary session, which IBP has helped organize and which is supported by a smaller number of like-minded actors, including the governments of Sweden, the US, Rwanda and South Africa, the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI), the World Bank and CSOs like Transparency International and Publish What You Fund. In this session, more ambitious targets and commitments around aid and budget transparency will be discussed, and hopefully agreed.

One of the most important aspects of the discussions at Busan will be to agree on the future international architecture for development cooperation, with a view to overcome the limitations of the OECD/DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, which for too long has been seen as too exclusive a body that does not reflect the role of emerging donors and the need for a more equal partnership between donor and recipient governments. The current draft of the Busan Outcome Document talks about the establishment of a Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. Ideally, this body should include a specific mechanism for ensuring the transparency-related commitments are monitored and enforced. Such mechanism would also gain from a multi-stakeholder nature, following the example of the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), which brings together governments, international organizations and civil society groups in a joint effort to promote fiscal transparency across the world.

The International Budget Partnership will be represented at the Busan Forum, and will report back on what happened.

Watch this space!

How to cut expenditure strategically: Swaziland and the United States

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Last week the World Bank told Swaziland to cut its spending in order to curtail its sprawling deficit. And how should this be done? Well, by simply administering an across the board pay cut to civil servants. Not too sophisticated. Expect trouble.

When the USA had its own fiscal crisis earlier this year, David Brooks of the New York times suggested a much more rational approach to reducing expenditure. In a nutshell, this is what he said:

“Trim from the old to invest in the young. We should adjust pension promises and reduce the amount of money spent on health care during the last months of life so we can preserve programs for those who are growing and learning the most.”

If  spending cuts are unavoidable, surely it would be more prudent to cut strategically? The World Bank’s advisors tell poor countries to allocate funding on the basis of policy priorities. Surely cuts in spending should be made on the basis of policy priorities as well? And not through indiscriminate measures like across the board cuts in civil servants salaries?