The Partnership Question 

Close to a thousand delegates from the African continent and beyond are descending on Cape Town for the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Africa Regional Summit from 4 - 6 May 2016. At this grand market of ideas, African countries will take stock of how they have fared in promoting transparency and accountability in the conduct of public affairs and management of scarce public resources. Delegates will consider such tools as open budgeting, open contracting, open data and access to information, and the  common theme throughout will be how these tools of accountability are used to ensure inclusive and sustainable development. Read the full blog here. 

Expanding the Reach of OGP in Francophone Africa 

In October 2015, during the Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire officially became the international initiative’s first sub-Saharan Francophone member. This is an important step for this booming country, which is emerging from memories of a post-electoral crisis that still remain fresh.

President Alassane Ouattara, who aims to make Côte d’Ivoire an emerging country by 2020, has implemented a number of initiatives in the domain of transparency and good governance, including through OGP membership. OGP is an international multi-stakeholder initiative launched in 2011 which aims to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance – in a spirit of collaboration between government, non-state actors, civil society organizations, and the media. Read the full blog here.

OGP Africa: Commitments to Watch 

By Joseph Foti, Program Manager, Independent Reporting Mechanism

Big things are happening in African OGP countries.

Yet, a recent report on OGP’s “starred commitments”--the most ambitious reforms in OGP-- did not feature any African commitments, showing the difficulty of implementation across the continent.

But the pattern of weak implementation doesn’t have to stay that way.

Here we highlight a few of the reforms that, according to our Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) reports, show some progress, but need the extra push to get them across the finish line. Once completed, these reforms could mean big things for each of the OGP countries. In OGP-speak, most of these commitments were judged by the IRM to be “potentially transformative” in their respective policy area, but none of them had reached completion. Read the full blog here. 

It’s all happened quickly. For several years a motley crew of us worked on the idea of open government, open budgets, open data – but it was often a marginal conversation. Then in 2010 the tide turned, there was international momentum, and we jumped on the opportunity to help promote the idea that became the Open Government Partnership. We hoped that this idea would interest ten or fifteen countries... never had we imagined that in less than five years it would include 69 countries and over 2,500 specific commitments to open up government. Sure, there are many substantive problems in many of these countries and commitments, but it still is a remarkable achievement. Click here to read the full interview. 

Electoral boundaries in Kenya. Unifying all national bank accounts in Sierra Leone. Mapping conservation areas in South Africa. Land ownership data in Liberia.

For those who follow events in each of these countries, these are all big ideas with potentially big results. And they were all in the most recent OGP action plans of these African countries. When it comes to big ambitions and socially relevant commitments, the OGP participating countries in Africa lead the global pack.

Indeed this is supported by the data. The OGP Steering Committee gave OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism (where we work) the task of assessing the “potential impact” of commitments. When we compare African countries to countries in other regions, we see a big difference.

But we see another difference. Read the full blog here.