Integrity Insider – October 2019

Over the last couple of months we’ve enthusiastically dived into a Strategy Update process intended to ensure that we do an even better job of listening and responding to our partners’ needs, and that we have a clear and compelling value proposition. That will be a key item for our board meeting on October 23, chaired by Ania Calderon, who we were pleased to see on Apolitical’s list of the 100 most influential people in digital government.

As we sharpen and refine our strategy, we also are recruiting a new Managing Director for Programs and Learning to fill the very big shoes left by Michael Moses. Michael has made an outstanding contribution to Global Integrity over the last six years; while we are happy that he has found an exciting new role with DAI, we will be sad to see him go.

Over the coming weeks, we’re very much looking forward to advancing projects on corruption and the use of data in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Colombia; participating in the OECD Anti-Corruption Task Team’s meeting in Berlin; and launching a series of international case studies with lessons about democracy relevant to the United States as a part of the Open Gov Hub’s Defending Democracy series.

TAI Learning Partnership

We continue to support the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s (TAI) exploration of data for accountability issues in Nigeria and Colombia. In Nigeria, this means supporting TAI member grantees like the Public and Private Development Center and Human and Environmental Development Agenda in gathering and using evidence to inform their work to open up public procurement and support the tracing, freezing, and repatriation of stolen assets.

In Colombia, we’ve supported TAI’s efforts to engage with national and subnational stakeholders in the extractives sector and worked with TAI and the International Finance Corporation to revise and refine emerging recommendations from a joint assessment of the availability and usability of data in the sector.

Learning Collaborative Initiatives—Continuing to Follow the Money 

With our partners, the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI) and GESOC, we continue to support local organizations as they build a network on municipal open contracting and accountability on the use of public resources and municipal planning in difficult contexts:

• Continuing our collaboration with Karewa in building a national network of organizations that demand open contracting in Mexican municipalities, we worked with BIOS in Cozumel, mobilizing local leaders and authorities to come together and collaborate in addressing key municipal challenges.
• In Veracruz, we worked with Orfis and Instituto Veracruzano de Acceso a la Información (IVAI) to engage students from universities and technical centers statewide. 

Central African Coalition Against Kleptocracy

We conducted a workshop with coalition members from Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo. Activities included creating a theory of change and generating monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) indicators to support the coalition in strategizing and testing, reflecting and adapting over the course of the project.

Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI-ACE) research programme

We launched the new GI-ACE website, featuring updated information and weekly blog posts from the 14 funded projects, a wide range of resources, and more. We will be meeting with our grantees in the coming weeks to gauge progress on stakeholder engagement, which is important for testing whether and how the GI-ACE Theory of Change is playing out.

Transparency International 

We partnered with Transparency International on a new guide that sets out Five Principles for Engaging Citizens in Anti-Corruption Mechanisms, and published a corresponding blog as to how and why this sort of research, integrated learning, and adaptation matter. 

Multi-donor Trust Fund Projects

Working with the Open Data Charter, Latin American Open Data Initiative (ILDA), and others to design a new Open Data for Anti-Corruption initiative, we’ve taken the lead on facilitating the creation of a theory of change and MEL framework for the project, and are excited to kick off work with local partners in the coming months.

We’ve also worked closely with partners in Costa Rica, providing strategic guidance and advice as they design problem-focused action plan commitments and develop processes that will enable the local multistakeholder forum to collect evidence and learn throughout the implementation process.

OGP Facilitators’ Convening

We were happy to participate in the recent Facilitators’ Convening hosted by the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Support Unit, in which we worked with an impressive group of experts to reflect with the Unit on how they might improve the support available to OGP partners at the country level. As our longtime readers likely know, this is an issue that we’ve worked on and written about for years, and it’s exciting to see OGP addressing this important challenge.

Construction Sector Transparency (CoST) Initiative

We were excited to join CoST’s recent workshop in Costa Rica, where we presented our approach and discussed how CoST partners might more effectively leverage the platform it provides to drive progress on more open, effective governance. We look forward to carrying these discussions forward over the next few months.

Open Gov Hub launched its first-ever Collaboration Funds of $10,000 each. The Collaborative Learning Seed Fund aims to support joint projects between Hub members in Washington, D.C., and the Global Affiliates Fund supports joint projects between our Global Affiliate Hubs.

In July, we ran our first retreat for Global Affiliate Hubs, which brought together 10 social change leaders from 8 countries and 4 continents, spending 4 days learning about how to run better civic innovation hubs.

We welcomed our first Program Manager to a newly expanded Hub team, and an excellent new cohort of four part-time Fall Hub Catalysts. In September, we welcomed a diverse group of new OGH members representing different segments of open gov work, from investigative journalism and U.S. democracy reform work to monitoring and evaluation for international development impact.

• Anti-corruption in adverse contexts: strategies for improving implementation, by Mushtaq Khan, Antonio Andreoni, and Pallavi Roy
• Building an eco-system: why it matters, by Ory Okolloh
• El potencial del ‘govtech’ para revolucionar gobiernos y sociedades, by Enrique Zapata
  (The potential of ‘govtech’ to revolutionize governments and societies)
• The Laundromat, a film based on the Panama Papers scandal
• Monitoring and Results Measurement: ideas for a new conceptual framework, by Marcus Jenal 
• Raw data won’t solve our problems — asking the right questions will, by Stefaan G. Verhulst
• Reflexiones desde la mitad del mundo: innovación en las contrataciones abiertas en América Latina, by Nicolás Penagos
  (Reflections from the middle of the world: innovation in open contracting from Latin America)
• Tale of the converted: how complex social problems have made me question the use of data in driving impact, by John Burgoyne
• Understanding Social Norms: A reference guide for policy and practice, by Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church and Diana Chigas

These pieces and more are collated in our 1,200-strong library of articles on adaptive development, open government, systems, complexity, and learning. If you’d like access to this Evernote collection, please email Alan directly.