Tag: accountability

Account4COVID Webinar Summary: Reflections of an online conversation with some of Africa’s frontline civic actors

Lindelwa Nxele

Background/context

With the outbreak of Covid-19, many governments’ health and basic service delivery systems have already been placed under considerable strain and across Africa, fragile health and economic systems are likely to face further planning and budgeting challenges now and in the aftermath of the pandemic. As a result, international financial institutions, private foundations and development agencies are pledging billions of dollars across the globe for governments to successfully combat COVID-19 and to cushion the most vulnerable populations from its socio-economic impact.  The pandemic has also exacerbated pressure on the region’s public financial management (PFM) systems as well as exposed previous and ongoing corruption as more questions are being asked as to why health systems are weak/underprepared for the pandemic. At the same time, COVID-19 public health interventions are curtailing the abilities of citizens to exert accountability and oversight in many ways. Civic space and any efforts to expose COVID-19 related corruption are therefore vulnerable to clamp down. Local Transparency, Accountability and Participation (TAP) strategies are therefore critical to solving a lot of these challenges and to the future of better health &  broader fiscal governance systems.

 

In April 2020, 8 organizations –  Accountability Lab Africa & DC offices, African Freedom Information Center, AfroLeadership, BudgIT, CODE / Follow The Money Africa, the Public Service Accountability Monitor and Global Integrity – came together to collaborate on Account4COVID, an initiative that promotes and advocates for greater accountability, civic inclusion & transparency of COVID19 public allocations and expenditures.

 

Distilling our collective objectives

In May 2020, the above organizations scheduled a call with several organizations working in the field of fiscal governance transparency and accountability on the continent. These calls sought to explore how an initiative like Account4COVID could strengthen their local TAP strategies concerning publicly funded COVID-19 efforts. The consultative calls confirmed the need to gather actors from across the region to analyse the impact of COVID19 on fiscal governance and to exchange ideas and lessons for possible strategies to improve transparency, accountability and participation in the following key areas:

  • Access to information & data to map and track allocation and expenditure of COVID-19 public funds ;
  • Contracting & Public Procurement of goods and services for COVID-19 efforts ;
  • The provision of health and basic services (water, sanitation and social welfare) especially for the poor and vulnerable communities ;
  • Oversight, anti-corruption regulations and mechanisms.

 

The Account4COVID initiative plans to hold a series of webinar sessions to facilitate dialogue, networking and exchange between civil society organizations, and other change agents seeking to address TAP challenges and opportunities related to Covid-19 in their contexts.

 

Insights from the 1st webinar

The first webinar on 17 June aimed to provide an overview of select COVID-19 related transparency initiatives across Africa. Additionally – the objective was to share, reflect and learn about some of the emerging opportunities and challenges concerning demands for transparency, accountability and participation in the use of COVID-19 related funds. The webinar attracted a diverse audience including advocates of open government, social accountability and open budgets in Africa and beyond. Speakers’ inputs and questions from the floor illustrated a range of important interventions to tackle novel (and not -so- novel) socio-economic challenges.

 

Hamzat Lawal, Chief Executive, Connected Development, Nigeria & Founder, Follow The Money International  provided an update on  its  Follow The Money initiative which officially began in 2012 has been scaled up in recent months to a pan-African campaign which empowers other civic actors and oversight bodies with a technology application to map and track the COVID-19 donations in Kenya, The Gambia, Malawi, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Nigeria. In Zimbabwe, the technology application has also been designed to assist with contract tracing by mapping Covid 19 hot spots in Zimbabwe.

 

Masana Ndinga-Kanga, Crisis Response Fund Lead at CIVICUS in South Africa shared about impact of the South African government’s public health interventions on the right of civic actors to  freely exercise oversight, organise, participate in decision making processes particularly around COVID-19 allocations & expenditures.  She also highlighted how their transparency demands and participation in COVID-19 decision making processes as CIVICUS are designed to address the inequality gap within South Africa, in order to protect vulnerable communities from the pandemic. She also spoke about the unequal power relations between Western lending institutions and African governments which end up influencing fiscal priorities more than local voices.

 

Wanjiru Gikonyo, Director of The Institution of Social Accountability (TISA), Kenya talked about the lack of data, transparency and participation around current COVID-19 debt relief loan negotiations & other debt service offers  from international financial institutions which is intended to free up resources for public sector health needs and other emergency spending. She pointed to the importance of debt transparency to mitigate against  unmanageable debt levels which reduce domestic resource availability for future development priorities.

 

Moussa Kondo, Country Director for Accountability Lab, Mali presented on a recently launched Coronavirus CivActs Campaign (CCC)  – a Citizen Help Desk to prevent misinformation and close data gaps including providing reliable data on Covid 19 donations and monitoring its expenditure by government as well as debunking pandemic myths and rumours. In the case of Mali, Accountability Lab has translated all the relevant data into local languages.

 

Uadamen Ilevbaoje, Project Lead for BudgIT’s spoke about the launch of a web based platform focused on COVID 19 building on their outstanding work with Tracka. The platform monitors Covid-19 donations given to the federal and state governments of Nigeria ranging from private and public, local and international organizations.

 

Learning and inspiration

The main takeaways and lessons learned from current COVID related TAP initiatives on the continent include

  • COVID-19 has multiple revenue streams (private sector, foreign assistance, private donations, debt loans, national & sub national budgets & emergency funds). Technology has played a vital role in gathering all these different data sources in a ‘one stop shop’ and presenting it in an easily accessible way ;
  • Aggregated data on its own is not useful, most campaigns aim to disaggregate the data as much as possible, and also gather data on the conditions and purpose of the funds in order to hold public officials accountable for the delivery of goods and services ;
  • Civic actors need to pay equal attention to both transparency of allocated COVID-19 funds, as well as transparency around COVID related deferred debt payments and extension of additional credit ;
  • TAP strategies have instrumental value and they are being used by civic actors to respond to contextual challenges such as inequality which has exacerbated the negative impact of COVID-19 on the lives of poor and vulnerable communities
  • The political dynamics of unequal power relations and systems between international actors (donors) and local actors (national government) impact on fiscal governance priorities & decision making processes;
  • Local TAP strategies are fighting the pandemic not only by providing financial data but by providing vulnerable communities with reliable information and facts about the virus. Countering misinformation, education and awareness raising tactics have thus been infused into the local TAP strategies.

 

At the end of the webinar, 45 attendees voted on the topic of discussion for the next Account4COVID webinar. Anti-corruption received the majority of the vote with 27%. 20% showed interest in the Socio-economic impact of COVID. The following topics:  Contracting & Procurement, Expenditure Tracking, Health and basic service provision each received a vote of 13%. Access to information and Closing civic space each received a vote of 7%.

 

We hope to co-create a webinar series that is tailored to the needs of governance reformers. In order to help us do this,  please kindly complete this short survey.

 

If you would like to participate in the next Account4COVID webinar and/or in the initiative more broadly please do feel free to reach out at acc4covid@gmail.com.  This initiative, although limited to COVID19 and TAP in Africa,  is open to any and all organizations interested in joining the initiative. Join the initiative and continue conversations offline!

Court orders dissolution of Makana municipality

Lindelwa Nxele

By . The original article can be accessed here

Provincial government must place municipality under administration: Members of the Unemployed People’s Movement protest outside the High Court in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) in September. Archive photo: Lucas Nowicki

The Makhanda High Court, on Tuesday morning, ordered the Makana municipality to be dissolved and placed under administration for violating its constitutional mandate by failing to provide basic services to the community.

The application was brought by the Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) and other civil society organisations against the municipality, which was the first respondent, and several others in February 2019. The applicants were represented by Wheeldon, Rushmere & Cole. The case was heard in September. Makana includes Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown.

The order has to be carried out by the provincial executive of the Eastern Cape, one of the respondents in the case.

Judge Igna Stretch wrote that the municipality’s conduct has been “inconsistent with the 1996 constitution of the Republic of South Africa”, breaching section 152 (1) and section 153 (a) by “failing to promote a healthy and sustainable environment for the community”.

An administrator will be appointed until elections for a new Municipal Council, as stipulated in section 139 (1) of the Constitution. The provincial executive has to implement a recovery plan to guarantee the municipality meets its constitutional obligations.

The application accused Makana Municipality of corruption, failure to provide water and sewerage services, and serious neglect of municipal infrastructure, leaving roads filled with potholes and garbage.

In a statement released after the judgment, UPM chairperson Ayanda Kota said that “democracy has been served”.

The full record of the judgment is available on the following link http://copsam.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/UPM-vs-Premier-16-Others-Judgement-14.01.2020.pdf

Treasure Island: Leak Reveals How Mauritius Siphons Tax From Poor Nations to Benefit Elites

Vanessa Malila

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has revealed a large scale investigation which reveals how multinational companies used Mauritius to avoid taxes in countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.

Mauritius Leaks is an investigation into how one law firm on a small island off Africa’s east coast helped companies leach tax revenue from poor African, Arab and Asian nations.

Based on 200,000 files, Mauritius Leaks exposes a sophisticated system that diverts tax revenue from poor nations back to the coffers of Western corporations and African oligarchs.

Some of the key findings:

  • Law firm Conyers Dill & Pearman and major audit firms, including KPMG, enabled corporations operating in some of the world’s poorest nations to exploit tax loopholes;
  • A private equity push into Africa backed by anti-poverty crusader and rock star Bob Geldof benefited from Mauritius’ treaties that divert tax revenue away from Uganda and elsewhere;
  • Multi-billion dollar U.S. companies Aircastle and Pegasus Capital Advisers cut taxes through confidential contracts, leases and loans involving Mauritius and other tax havens;
  • Officials from countries in Africa and Southeast Asia told ICIJ that tax treaties signed with Mauritius had cost them greatly and that renegotiating them was a priority.

For the full report and revelations go to the ICIJ website

 

 

Why Uganda needs new laws to hold police in check, and accountable

Vanessa Malila

By: Sylvie Namwase, Post Doctorate Researcher under the DANIDA funded project on militarisation, sustainable growth and peace in Uganda., University of Copenhagen

In May this year Uganda’s Constitutional Court made a ruling that offered a welcome development for domestic justice for victims of police violence, as well as an opportunity for police reform.

The Court declared a provision of the Uganda Police Act unconstitutional and void. The provision allowed police officers to use unlimited force when dispersing crowds with no liability for deaths or injuries.

This is a big win for Uganda. The country has a record of police killings as a result of excessive force used during mass protests for which there is almost never accountability.

The decision is indeed a milestone. But it isn’t likely to have any major effect unless there is pressure for new laws in Uganda that set international standards on the use of force and firearms during crowd control. Previous milestone decisions by Ugandan courts have either been ignored by the state, or have been circumvented through other legislation.

The courts have acted before

In 2008 the Constitutional Court nullified a provision of the Police Act which granted powers to the Inspector General of Police to disperse public assemblies if he or she believed they might cause a breach of the peace. The Court ruled that the Inspector General’s discretionary powers were excessive and effectively rendered freedom of assembly under the Ugandan Constitution illusory.

But in 2013 the Ugandan Parliament passed the Public Order Management Act. This gave the Inspector General powers to regulate the conduct of all public gatherings. It also required all conveners to notify the Inspector General of planned public meetings in advance. And it granted the Inspector General powers to bar the convening of a meeting at any venue if it was in the interest of crowd and traffic control.

This effectively revived the Inspector General’s powers to limit freedom of assembly. The Inspector General has used this discretion to bar the public assemblies and activities of some political opposition and civil society groups. These decisions have been based on broad and unsubstantiated claims of security interests and crowd control.

For example, the Inspector General has banned music concerts by prominent opposition Member of Parliament and musician, Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine. This has included concerts on his private property.

When it comes to the excessive use of force, Uganda has a multiplicity of laws that empower the police and other security agencies to carry out arrests as well as to control and disperse crowds. The laws place no limits on the use of force or the use of firearms. This means that, despite the Court’s ruling, loopholes for the use of excessive force persist within Uganda’s legal framework.

For example, the provision of the Police Act nullified by the Constitutional Court exists in the same substantive terms under the Penal Code Act. This allows the police to disperse riotous assemblies by all means necessary without legal consequences for any deaths or injuries.

Other gaps in the law exist in the Criminal Procedure Code Act, The Prisons Act, and The Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces Act.

What needs to be done

Uganda needs a comprehensive regulatory framework to govern public assembly. This framework would balance law enforcement and human rights interests, including protecting the right to freedom of assembly. Without this framework the enjoyment of this right will continue to be subject to the political interests of the regime in power.

The same dynamics apply when it comes to excessive force used to disperse public gatherings organised by political opposition groups or those opposed to the regime.

A clarity and harmony of standards is especially important as there’s an increasing blurring of police and military roles in the country.

Uganda has an active civil society and a liberal constitutional provision for public interest litigation that can enable this.

As a practical way to ensure the Constitutional Court’s most recent decision doesn’t become another forgotten milestone, civil society organisations such as the Uganda Law Society can do two things. The first is to undertake a comprehensive mapping of all laws related to use of force in the country and determine where they fall short of constitutional and human rights standards.

The second would be to engage the police, parliament and the judiciary to map out a regulatory statutory framework. This would lay down more detailed standards on the use of force by all mandated to use force when controlling crowds.

These standards can be drawn from the wealth of relevant international guidelines. These include the 1979 Code of Conduct for law enforcement officials, the 1990 United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of force and Firearms for Law Enforcement Officers, and the African Union Guidelines for Policing of Assemblies by Law Enforcement Officials in Africa.

Reforms along these lines aren’t relevant only to Uganda. Recent civil uprisings in Sudan and Algeria show that people are increasingly seeking change through public protest. This underscores the need to get clarity on standards police should be obligated to apply against protesters. And to crystallise a legal basis of criminal liability for excessive force at both national and international levels.

The clarity of legal standards would ensure that citizens can advance democratic and human rights in Africa using peaceful means.The Conversation

Sylvie Namwase, Post Doctorate Researcher under the DANIDA funded project on militarisation, sustainable growth and peace in Uganda., University of Copenhagen

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Defending Civic Space: Four unresolved questions

Vanessa Malila

Article By Thomas Carothers, Director, and Saskia Brechenmacher, Associate Fellow, Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The trend of closing civic space crystallised at the beginning of this decade. In response, concerned international actors — including various bilateral aid agencies, foreign ministries, private foundations and international nongovernmental organisations — are working to address this problem. They have carried out many diagnostic efforts and gained greater knowledge of the issue. They have initiated a wide range of measures to limit or counteract it, from setting up emergency funds for endangered activists and supporting national campaigns against new civil society restrictions to pushing international bodies, like the Financial Action Task Force, to take better account of the issue.

Despite these efforts, the negative trend persists. Every year, more governments take formal and informal measures to reduce the space for independent civil society. Attacks on the legitimacy of international support for civil society continue to multiply. Shared learning amongst those actors intent on closing space seems to be increasing at a faster rate than learning amongst those fighting back. Furthermore, new dimensions of the problem keep emerging. In some countries, a rise in nationalism or religious fundamentalism has led to new attacks on minorities and progressive civil society groups by both state and non-state actors. Autocratic governments are now using new technological tools to amplify their repressive tactics and illiberal narratives, both domestically and across borders. More generally, while the issue of closing civic space initially appeared to be a discrete challenge, consisting primarily of restrictive NGO laws and a backlash against cross-border civil society funding, it now appears to be just one part of a much broader pattern of global democratic recession and authoritarian resurgence.

This sobering reality requires the international community of concerned actors to think hard about how to strengthen their responses. In some ways, relevant actors already know a lot about the types of efforts that are useful, such as the value of supporting national coalitions to resist restrictive measures. But on a surprisingly wide range of issues, considerable doubt and debate persists. Some of the uncertainty concerns small to medium-sized issues. For example, some civil society funders feel that making their assistance more transparent will help reduce suspicion and pushback, while others fear that greater transparency will only facilitate repression. And while some hold that pushing local partners to build wider constituencies for their work is key to resisting attacks on the legitimacy of civil society, others argue that constituency-building will always be a limited strategy as many civic causes inherently appeal only to certain communities.

Beyond these important operational and programmatic debates, a number of larger questions remain unresolved in the minds of many funders:

Closing or changing? Is the overall phenomenon best understood as a global trend of closing civic space, or of changing civic space? In other words, should it be understood as a more multidimensional and politically varied development than implied by the closing space narrative? Some critics argue that the “closing space” discourse assumes a largely homogenous civil society that primarily consists of professionalised NGOs and, in so doing, misses how civil society is changing but not necessarily shrinking in many places. Such changes include an expansion of space for conservative civic movements, a transformation of activism into more fluid and informal forms, the multiplication of large-scale protest movements, and the emergence of new types of digital activism. If change, rather than simply closure, is the more accurate lens, what does this mean for how international actors should adjust to this new global environment?

Symptoms or root causes? Is it more effective to focus on a relatively bounded agenda of promoting a positive enabling environment for civil society, or should funders approach the issue at a much higher level, and more broadly fight backsliding on democracy, pluralism and human rights? Some concerned actors have the sense that responses to date have been mostly reactive, and that simply anticipating, resisting and adapting to new restrictions risks missing the root causes of the problem. Yet, if root causes and drivers are to be addressed more proactively, do we agree on what these are, and how to ensure that a broader focus does not end up diluting action or having a paralysing effect?

Global versus local? How can funders most effectively support local-level responses to the problem while taking into account its transnational and global dimensions? Many concerned international actors agree that effective responses need to be primarily located at the national level and be driven by local civil society. At the same time, the problem of shrinking civic space has clear transnational and global dimensions. Governments worldwide are using a similar playbook and engaging in repression across borders. Certain illiberal narratives also appear to be spreading transnationally through concerted cross-border actions. For funders, this raises the question of how to best integrate the global dimensions of the trend with their country-specific strategies and ensure their various efforts add up to a coherent whole.

To blame or not to blame? Lastly, have aid providers done enough to ensure that they are not contributing to shrinking civic space? Aid providers continue to debate the extent to which they are exacerbating the problem by imposing, for example, certain organisational models on the civic sector in aid-receiving countries that make civil society less domestically rooted and sustainable. Local civil society organisations still often cite current funding models — especially the ever-growing pressures for detailed monitoring and evaluation — as one of the biggest barriers to do their work effectively, independently from government restrictions. Some funders have made concrete changes in their funding practices to try reaching a wider range of more informal civil society actors, rather than the same usual suspects. Others face internal bureaucratic barriers that make greater flexibility difficult.

Ultimately, mounting a larger, more effective and more coordinated response to the still-growing trend of closing civic space is a fundamental challenge for international aid and policy actors committed to democracy and human rights. Facing these various unresolved questions and working together to arrive at consensus-based answers to them is one part of the task.

 

By Thomas Carothers, Director, and Saskia Brechenmacher, Associate Fellow, Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Originally published on the OECD Development Matter blog

Can social media help anti-corruption drives? A Nigerian case study

Vanessa Malila

Tolu Olarewaju, Staffordshire University

Corruption can have a crippling effect on a country’s economy. This is why African businesses have described ending corruption as “priority number one”.

Take Nigeria, where the basic infrastructure deficit is huge but funds to improve its infrastructure always seem to end up missing or misallocated. In addition, projects are started and never finished. As a result the country’s roads, rail and ports are in a deplorable state.

Nigerians also suffer from persistent electricity shortages. They lack pipe-borne water and proper sanitation facilities. Housing provision is a problem too.

The country has spent billions of US dollars to resuscitate its power and transport sectors. But it has very little to show for it. Nigeria is not alone. Researchers often report that infrastructure spending is regularly used by public officers and government officials across the continent to misappropriate funds.

Tackling corruption is notoriously difficult. Once it’s embedded in a country’s systems it’s difficult to weed out. But a fresh approach is being pursued in Nigeria – with some startling results. Ordinary citizens are mobilising the use of technology and social media to produce evidence that’s used to hold officials to account.

Our research set out to discover whether the use of technology and social media by ordinary citizens to monitor infrastructure projects could result in more infrastructure projects being completed – and could also lessen corruption.

A version of this approach has been tried in countries like Peru and South Korea. Nigeria seems to be the first – at least on the African continent – to monitor infrastructure projects in this way.

Our research found, for example, that the camera feed showing the construction of the second river Niger bridge, and similar schemes by Tracka gave citizens the power to monitor infrastructure projects. It also increased transparency and could be used to hold the government and engineering firms that build infrastructure to account.

But we also found that there were challenges. For example, citizens needed data and power to monitor infrastructure projects. Neither was always available.

The approach

Monitoring projects has been used by firms and the government as a way to provide more transparency.

For example, research from Uganda shows that corrupt government officials were less able to siphon money for their own enrichment when citizens knew where money was supposed to go and could therefore monitor spending; the diversion of funds fell by 12% over six years.

Research from Kenya also showed that public monitoring of government projects reduced corruption by 20%.

In Nigeria, we investigated infrastructure projects that were monitored by citizens and compared these to infrastructure projects that weren’t monitored. We found that there was a positive link between citizens using technology and social media to monitor infrastructure projects and better completion rates and standards for the infrastructure projects.

Generally, when government officials and infrastructure building engineering firms knew that they were being monitored, they didn’t want to get caught out. In certain cases, citizens were able to engage with the ministry of works and their state governor and use social media to engage in discussions about the project.

By taking pictures of the proposed infrastructure sites and tagging their state governors or representatives in regular posts about the infrastructure projects, civic participation was encouraged. Although there was no often response in the first instance, the high visibility generated by social media and the threat of losing forthcoming elections often resulted in the infrastructure projects being completed. But this was only for projects that citizens could monitor – and there are too few of these. Even we struggled to find many.

Our investigations also revealed that frequent offline and online discussions created awareness about the infrastructure projects and helped citizens to suggest projects that would be useful for their communities.

Challenges to this approach

This approach is not without its challenges.

For example, citizens needed key information to monitor infrastructure projects properly. This included the type, cost, key stages and duration of the projects. Only then would they be able to compare what was actually happening before their eyes to what had been budgeted for so they could alert the relevant authorities as soon as there were discrepancies.

Mobile network technology and access to social media platforms are also needed to make this work.

There were also social and cultural issues. Some citizens didn’t want to engage with social media and technology for personal reasons. In addition, when evidence of corruption was reported by citizens, some saw this as a politically motivated attack. The result was that they lashed out instead of trying to solve the corruption being exposed.

Other challenges included:

  • a lack of clear penalties for individuals involved with monitored infrastructure projects that not completed, or not completed to a decent standard;
  • a lack of follow up by the relevant anti-corruption authorities; and
  • not enough being done when there were clear cases of standards not being met.

Implications

Technology and social media can be used as effective tools by citizens to monitor infrastructure projects. But this isn’t enough on its own. It can only be effective if budgets are also made fully visible.

This would enable citizens to know what they are monitoring and what to look for. Citizens would be wise to demand such transparency: honest governments will have nothing to fear.

This points to the need for a comprehensive approach to tackling corruption. This would need to include transparency and offline and online citizen engagement. In this context, technology and social media could be used as complementary tools.

If African governments and infrastructure building engineering firms on the continent are really concerned about corruption and want to show that they have nothing to hide, they can use this approach to gain more trust from the citizenry.The Conversation

Tolu Olarewaju, Lecturer in Economics, Staffordshire University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The man with a tablet for making aid to African countries better

Vanessa Malila

Struck by failings in the implementation of health projects, a Mozambican entrepreneur has turned to tech for a solution.

The Guardian reports this week that Dayn Amade, founder of Maputo-based technology company Kamaleon, is calling for the World Health Organization and aid groups to reassess how people on the African continent are educated about disease prevention.

“Aid efforts are being hampered by a failure to educate people on the question of why prevention is needed, and by organisations’ ability to tailor messages to local communities,” he said.

Amade is the creator of a digital platform called the community tablet, an interactive platform through which people can be educated and informed about issues impacting their lives. The device, which runs on up to six large, solar-powered LCD screens and is transported on a trailer, can be attached to anything from a car to a donkey, enabling it to reach even the most remote or isolated rural communities.

Dayn Amade
Dayn Amade, founder and CEO of Kamaleon, brings internet access to remote areas. Photograph: Courtesy Kamaleon

You can read the full story here

Content and photos Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

Another successful year for Africa Integrity Indicators!

Vanessa Malila

This article was first published on the Global Integrity website here

 

Global Integrity is pleased to announce the release of provisional data for the seventh round of its Africa Integrity Indicators (AII), available here.

This provisional data is available for public comment until May 31, 2019. We invite interested stakeholders to examine the data and share any feedback that can help increase its quality and usefulness. Don’t be shy – We value your input!

Preliminary findings

Below are some of our preliminary findings, but stay tuned! In the upcoming weeks, we will be starting a conversation to better understand how our data could help support your work.

The independence of the judiciary is under threat: In several countries, notably Ghana and Kenya, governments have taken steps to hamper the independence of the judiciary.

Bypassing public procurement guidelines: While regulations are supposed to control public procurement, there is a surge of contracts awarded without competition in Liberia, Benin and Mauritania. In Kenya, allegations of corruption in public procurement are increasing.

Crackdown on the publication of information: While some countries made progress towards open publication of information (notably Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, with substantial improvement from last year), more countries regressed, experiencing more censorship and/or self-censorship of media organizations and citizens’ online content (social media, blogs, etc).

What is the Africa Integrity Indicators Project, anyway?

Every year since 2013, the Africa Integrity Indicators project assesses the state of governance and aspects of social development across all 54 African countries. It produces qualitative data through 102 indicators in 13 categories addressing transparency and accountability, as well as social development.

The Africa Integrity Indicators data is a stand-alone assessment published by Global Integrity. It presents snapshots of evidence for each indicator, providing a score, the justification, and supporting sources.

Our goal is simple: to build accurate and reliable data, with an interface that enables the data to be examined at the country level (say, by tracking a country’s progress over time with regards to one particular indicator), and at the subject level (say, by comparing different countries’ performance on one indicator).

We want our data to empower actors at the national and regional and international levels working to advance governance reforms, and to foster a discussion on how governance challenges can be tackled.

We also strive to be rigorous and transparent; you can find our methodology here.

What’s new this year?

Previous rounds have addressed both “in law” and “in practice” indicators. In this round, we decided to focus solely on the “in practice” indicators. This is because prior rounds have highlighted “implementation gaps,” or the lag between the adoption of regulations aiming to improve certain issues, and the actual improvement on the ground.

So this year, we are prioritizing citizen’s experience in practice. (Don’t worry, we’ll include updates on the laws every three years to make sure we capture big changes and continue to provide a basis for assessing the implementation gap, a measure which we continue to feel provides an important starting point for understanding whether and why gaps persist, and what might be done to close the implementation gap).

How is our data unique?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How can you use our data?

Our work has been used by several institutions. Data that we collect against a number of questions feed into the Ibrahim Index of African Governance and into the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) by the World Bank. Through the WGI, the data also provides the Millennium Challenge Corporation with information that informs its decisions about country eligibility for Millennium Challenge Corporation compacts.

But you can use our data, too!

Our dataset is a practical entry point for research, advocacy and action:

  • Transparent: our methodology and sources are transparent, and data is open source;
  • Efficient: for each indicator, scores make it quick and easy to identify patterns across countries and across time;
  • Action-oriented: indicators are based on fact-based and country-specific qualitative research, which provides insight on what should be priorities for reforms.

This article was first published on the Global Integrity website here

Join the conversation!

We want to hear from you. Check out our preliminary data and give us your feedback. You have 2 months to help us improve our work!

If you have comments on specific facts and narratives or if you have suggestions related to the accuracy of our research, please contact us at aii@globalintegrity.org.

If you have general comments and suggestions about the usefulness of the data, how you use it, and how it can be improved, please submit your feedback in this form or the aforementioned email address. You can also connect with us on Twitter (@GlobalIntegrity).

Overcoming Hurdles to Citizen Activism for Fiscal Governance

Vanessa Malila

By Shaazka Beyerle and Davin O’Regan. Originally posted here

 

Policy and programs seeking to advance transparency and accountability in public budgets have tended to focus on the state apparatus. Whether it be new laws that require greater openness or punish malfeasance or entirely new commissions and regulatory agencies to strengthen checks and balances, many initiatives focus internally on the state – the civil service, the courts, the legislature, or the executive.

These efforts are critical for enhancing accountable fiscal governance, but they are insufficient for producing lasting change or surmounting some of the tallest reform hurdles. Oftentimes they are simply subverted or coopted by persons in power. As a result, they have limited ability to reduce corruption, which in turn means they cannot stem the continued loss of government funds necessary for public investments nor the political destabilization and potentially violent conflict-inducing effects of an increasingly aggrieved and frustrated citizenry.

Reform, however, is not always the result of technocratic tinkering and innovation but can be driven by popular, broad-based citizen action. Whether it be labor or environmental policies or various human and civil rights issues, social movements deploying various nonviolent tactics have consistently demonstrated the ability to achieve genuine – sometimes transformative – shifts in policy and government performance. The underlying dynamic involves grassroots organizing to amplify citizen voices and wield power.

Can such bottom-up citizen initiatives be fostered to advance fiscal governance? Based on a series of interviews and focus group engagements with transparency and accountability reform advocates in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ukraine conducted as part of a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, activists recounted two major challenges in mobilizing grassroots citizens for fiscal governance, and some lessons from our own initial research approach revealed a third challenge.

Challenge 1: Fiscal governance issues are technical and not immediately accessible for average citizens

The topic itself is arcane and technical, and therefore not immediately accessible for average citizens. As one activist in Kenya noted, there already is quite a bit of information on budgeting and spending available in Kenya, but “the question is how do you channel these things in an understandable ways that then create the [popular] action that is required” to pressure for more reform. In Ukraine, an anti-corruption advocate lamented that a new technological initiative to increase access to budgetary details of one oblast administration “gave citizens a tool to control budget funds but the other problem is that people don’t really understand it.” Another Ukrainian activist echoed the same sentiment, saying that the “end user [i.e., citizen] doesn’t really understand new anti-corruption terms and we have to explain in detail.”

Surveys of individuals’ experiences with bribery and corruption in Europe and Central Asia reinforce this notion of a substantial learning curve to actively mobilizing citizens in efforts to improve transparency or accountability. In most countries, difficulty in reporting incidents due to a lack of knowledge of how, where, or the associated costs to do so were consistently cited as the top reasons individuals did not report bribery or corruption, more so than fear of retaliation or a sense that there would be no consequences for the perpetrator.

Challenge 2: Maintaining mobilization after bursts of activism

Activists in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ukraine also cited sustainability as a challenge. Fiscal transparency and accountability are ongoing struggles, and maintaining mobilization after bursts of activism is difficult. A scandal might briefly grab headlines and galvanize popular support around the investigation of a specific individual, but it is hard to prolong citizen participation in the budgetary process or to monitor outputs and projects. Likewise, disillusionment can set in after grand victories that do not immediately result in perceptible accountability gains, such as the 2010 constitutional referendum in Kenya or recent electoral transitions in Nigeria. In Ukraine, many citizens were encouraged by the slew of dramatic, positive reforms that emerged following the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014, but, one activist noted, by 2018 “people began to lose confidence in reforms and that these reforms are being implemented effectively…there are doubts regarding how it is all going and whether it’s the right way or not.”

Challenge 3: Transparency and accountability activists rely heavily on support from external actors

Many of the activists and organizations we encountered were heavily reliant on financial assistance from external actors. Our research sought to understand the effects of this support on the impact and effectiveness of transparency and accountability campaigners. To do so we endeavored to interview and engage domestically funded organizations and activists and compare their experiences and approach to foreign funded groups. It proved difficult. Attempts at snowballing from foreign funded groups as well as outreach to in-country representatives of external actors produced few candidates. We did try reaching out to labor organizers and activists within religious organizations, given that these often have reliable domestic resources, but they typically did not work directly on transparency and accountability issues. Some independent or newer activists were referred to us, but they also did not always work on these issues, and some actually did obtain grants or foreign support over the course of our research.

Although our research has not yet concluded, a few factors seem to be at play. In some countries, there may just be limited activism around transparency and accountability that isn’t reliant to some extent on foreign funding, or such activism may be of such a different nature that it would be difficult to compare to externally financed organizations and groups even if we were able to identify and research it. Alternatively, initial groups and key informants we contacted may be so detached from domestically resourced movement actors that snowballing was not a viable technique for reaching them. For instance, there have been notable citizen- led and -funded efforts in other countries, such as the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan’s experience in India, discussed by Nikhil Dey in a previous Fiscal Futures post.

How can activists overcome these challenges and mobilize citizens?

First, take cues from the grassroots. As was the case with the Indian Right to Information movement profiled in the aforementioned blog post, the entry point is not rallying the public around abstract fiscal transparency issues and technocratic measures, but linking these directly to immediate problems. “We would like to have proper toilets, fit to be used by humans, disabled people and children,” declared Bukela Gincana, a social audit volunteer in South Africa. Insufficient, substandard sanitation afflicts marginalized communities and can lead to gender-based and communal violence. Up to 50 people share one toilet, many with no locks, and women have been raped at night, reported residents in Wattville, a collection of informal settlements in Cape Town. From 2015-2016, the Social Audit Network (SAN), Social Justice Coalition (SJC), the International Budget Partnership South Africa, and citizens engaged in two social audits focusing on sanitation service outsourcing. SJC, a “membership-based social movement” also launched a campaign to include the poor in budget decisions. Nonviolent tactics ranged from research, community organizing, education/training, engagement with locals/sanitation workers/officials, and advocacy, to physical inspections, protests, stunts, and citizen-state public forums. Finally, residents flooded the municipality with 3,000 formal submissions concerning the draft Cape Town budget, a creative mass action combining institutional and extra-institutional pressure.

A more recent example comes from Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. ReAcción, a youth-led hybrid civil society organization, has been mobilizing students for several years to map and monitor disbursements for public school infrastructure from FONACIDE (National Public Investment and Development Fund) in order to impact corruption and channel funds to marginalized schools prioritized by the Ministry of Education. After David Riveros García, reAcción’s founder, encountered difficulties building anti-corruption awareness amongst high school students, in 2013 he and friends latched on to public discontent over FONACIDE’s weak transparency and monitoring mechanisms and ensuing scandals.

Second, it may not be love at first sight. Even when their grievances and problems are central to the civic initiative, citizens won’t be clamoring to jump on the fiscal transparency bandwagon. Apathy, low self-confidence, and sometimes fear can be common obstacles. Nonviolent action initiatives cultivating collective responsibility, collective ownership, and collective identity help to overcome these challenges. ReAcción underscored to fellow students that they should be FONACIDE’s beneficiaries; corruption affected them and their schools; and they could make an impact. High-schoolers had a role in planning and decision-making, and through peers learned useful skills not only for monitoring but also for their own development, including dialoguing with elites, data visualization, and computer programming.

Third, spice it up. To get citizens involved in fiscal transparency, civic initiatives have added contextually-relevant culture, humor, fellowship, and social recognition into communications, skills,  leadership-building, engagement, and nonviolent tactics. In Wattville, community volunteers canvassed fellow residents. They wore easily recognizable in T-shirts with slogans such as, “Sanitation is dignity” and “Sifuna Ukwazi Iqiniso (We Want to Know the Truth).

Fourth, invest in education. IBP not only helped to gain documents from Cape Town’s municipality, it carried out local trainings in public finance, budget analysis, and procurement. The fiscal governance field can also support capacity building in effective grassroots engagement. At present, there seems to be an over-emphasis on “sustaining mobilization” and an under-investment in community-organizing, movement building, and leadership.

Fifth, develop incremental goals with tangible outcomes. According to scholar-practitioner Marshall Ganz, “without clear outcomes, neither leaders nor participants have any way to evaluate success or failure, to learn, or to experience the feedback essential to motivation.” How does this play out for fiscal transparency? Over two years, the Cape Town social audits yielded new toilets, improved employment conditions for janitors, citizen input into the subsequent tender document, and more generally, improved citizen-state communication. Moreover, in 2018, SJC, SAN, IBP, Planact, and the Wattville and Thembelihle communities joined forces to expand social audits to ten informal settlements. The objectives are not only to improve fiscal governance and direct sanitation service, but to change government systems. In Paraguay – through annual mapping and visualizations of the administrative process, cross-data research and visualizations, and monitoring of selected schools – reAcción’s volunteers contributed to increasing FONACIDE’s transparency from the Ministry of Education down to Ciudad del Este. Recently, reports Riveros García, the General Auditor’s report sent to President Abdo Benítez included the youth group’s 2018 Annual Report on the management of FONCIDE funds.

Fiscal governance poses unique challenges for activists. Annual budgets, government accounting, and procurement regulations are unlikely to turn average people to the streets. But dedicated efforts to punch through these more abstruse procedures and link them to citizen’s immediate well-being can help mobilize popular support for fiscal responsibility.

Shaazka Beyerle is a Senior Research Advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Davin O’Regan is Senior Program Officer for Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace. They oversee several research initiatives that examine the impact of foreign donor support for activists and social movement organizations in Nigeria, Kenya, Ukraine, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, and Burma.