Global Integrity Newsletter: December 2011

Dear friends – As I've written to you throughout the past year, 2011 has been a year of rapid growth for Global Integrity and our work. We opened a new office in Cape Town, South Africa and added some terrific new colleagues to our ranks. For better or for worse, I don't see things slowing down in 2012, and we're gearing up for bigger things in the year ahead.

 

We are in the process of identifying some new initiatives to tackle in 2012 and 2013 in addition to our many Local Integrity Initiative projects, the annual Global Integrity Report, Indaba, and Foglamp. One thing we do know is that we will be placing an increased emphasis on innovation as the core modus operandi of the organization, something we discussed heavily at our first-ever staff retreat this past October. We remain frustrated by the lack of risk taking across our community of practice (including in our own work!) and are looking to shake things up.

 

One of the ways we'll be doing that is to establish an Innovation Fund in 2012; the goal of the fund will be to seed high-risk but potentially high-reward new ways of both diagnosing and mitigating the challenges of corruption, transparency, and accountability. The fund, which will be open on a competitive basis to both internal Global Integrity managers as well as external partners, represents our first foray into putting capital behind experimental ideas. We know we have much to learn but are looking forward to seeding some of the next big breakthrough ideas in transparency and accountability.

 

As always, don't hesitate to pop by our offices the next time you are in Washington or Cape Town.

 

Best wishes for a healthy and successful 2012! 

Nathaniel

 

Nathaniel Heller

Executive Director

Global Integrity

 

 

In November, we released a new Local Integrity Initiative project: an assessment of transparency and anti-corruption mechanisms in Kenya's three largest cities (Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu). The Kenya City Integrity Report was a collaborative effort between Global Integrity, the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Kenyan Association of Manufacturers, CSO Network, and HAKIJAMI. Our colleague Marko Tomicic recently led outreach workshops in the three cities in partnership with our local research teams. While the methods we applied for gathering the governance data in the three cities were relatively "traditional" from the Global Integrity standpoint, the fact that local stakeholders now have hard data assessing the nuts and bolts of what's working and what's not in their municipal public sectors is fairly innovative, we believe, and can lead to evidence-based policy reforms. The success of the project reinforces our belief that sub-national and sector-level work around governance and transparency can often yield faster and more immediate reforms compared with national-level approaches. 

 

You can access all of the project data and background material on our website. 

 

 

 

We have remained very active in the nascent Open Government Partnership, including helping to lead the OGP's Networking Mechanism, which aims to connect aspiring OGP governments with the world's best suppliers of open government expertise from the public, private, and civic sectors. Global Integrity Executive Director Nathaniel Heller helped to lead plenary discussions amongst 40 governments at a December 2011 working-level meeting of OGP governments in Brasilia. We look forward to pressing ahead with OGP in the run-up to the April 2012 high-level meeting in Brazil. 

 

 

While the Indaba fieldwork platform remains an invaluable tool for all of Global Integrity's work (we currently have several disparate fieldwork projects running simultaneously on the platform), we are even more excited to celebrate the arrival of other groups to the Indaba family. This fall, both Transparency International-UK and Publish What You Fund launched data collection efforts on Indaba, and we're thrilled to have them live on the platform.

 

If you are interested in learning more about how Indaba can help to make life easier for individuals and organizations gathering information at scale, please contact our colleague Monika Shepard for an introductory brainstorming conversation. You can also learn more on the Indaba website.  

 

 

 

 

 

Global Integrity's Foglamp initiative was featured in this New York Times article exploring the emergence of hybrid non-profit organizations.

 

 

Our friends at Transparency International-UK are recruiting researchers in nearly 50 countries to help them gather data on defense sector integrity. As they describe their effort:

 

Transparency International UK's (TI-UK) International Defence and Security Programme has launched a new project: a global index to measure levels of integrity and corruption in national defence and security establishments worldwide. This metric came about in order to extend our work in counter-corruption analysis and comparison, and in response to a question reform-minded defence and security officials from a wide range of countries frequently asked us: how can we measure our improvement?

 

We think the project is great, plus it's running on Indaba. Click here to learn more and how to apply. All positions are paid.

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Our friends at the Transparency & Accountability Initiative are hiring a director. Click here for details.