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Archive for December, 2009
It’s Our Money, Where’s It Gone?
Posted in: Anti-Corruption, Blog, Video by Marco Puccia on December 28, 2009
Global Integrity posted this video on their blog, Global Integrity Commons, a while back and I wanted to make sure I share it with our readers as well. The following documentary was put together by The International Budget Partnership and shows how community members in Kenya are standing up to challenge corruption in their district by demanding access to information and conducting their own “social audits”.
This is a process that has been taken up in many countries across the globe, where ordinary citizens or councils of elders are taking charge of holding those with the discretion of spending taxpayer money to account through social/communal audits. It’s an awesome trend to see, and this documentary does a great job of capturing the movement!
International Anti-Corruption Day: Don’t Let Corruption Kill Development
Posted in: Anti-Corruption, Blog, Government by Anand Chandrasekhar on December 10, 2009
December 9th was marked all over the world as International Anti-corruption Day. The theme for this year was “Don’t let corruption kill development”. An apt theme considering that the World Bank Institute puts the annual loss attributed to corruption around the $1 trillion mark. As the Secretary General of the U.N said in his commemorating speech;
“When public money is stolen for private gain, it means fewer resources to build schools, hospitals, roads and water treatment facilities. When foreign aid is diverted into private bank accounts, major infrastructure projects come to a halt. Corruption enables fake or substandard medicines to be dumped on the market, and hazardous waste to be dumped in landfill sites and in oceans. The vulnerable suffer first and worst.”
Rooting Out Corruption in Afghanistan
Posted in: Anti-Corruption, Blog, Government, Video by Marco Puccia on December 7, 2009
Corruption in Afghanistan stands to be the largest prospective challenge to overcome in the country’s “nation building” effort. It can be argued that fight against corruption and an illicit underground economy in Afghanistan will be a larger force to combat that both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Aleksandr Shkolnikov recently published a post on the CIPE Development Blog posing the question, “What is to be done?”
His post included this excellent video from CBS News that I wanted to make sure I share with my readers here:
Non-profit Boards: Lessons for the Gatekeepers
Posted in: Blog, Non-Profits by Anand Chandrasekhar on December 4, 2009
Gone are the days when all that non-profit board members had to do was go through the motions at board meetings and reward themselves with a nice luncheon after. Limited funds and a plethora of NGOs competing for them, has meant that stakeholders (both within and outside non-profits) are increasingly demanding more from their board members. Having a star board member who is renowned and respected is all well and good but NGOs now expect active contribution that goes beyond mere ‘pulling power’.
Lifting the Veil on Foreign Assistance and Lobbying
Posted in: Blog, Foreign Assistance, Government, Video by Marco Puccia on December 3, 2009
I’ve been following the Ujima Project for a few months since its launch back in September. It was put together by New York Times reporter Ron Nixon and has partnered with technology partner Appfrica Labs. There are several projects working on AID transparency, including AiDA which is a project run by DC-based Development Gateway where I worked for a while. In fact, I just found out that AiDA will be teaming up with Project-Level Aid (PLAID) and the Secretariat of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee to create a joint, easily accessible and independent repository of aid activities. See the announcement here.
Ujima is described as an investigative reporting tool that uses “reverse transparency” to aggregate foreign assistance data from multiple sources and present it in an open and easily accessible database. One of the most interesting features on Ujima is the “Lobbying” section of the site, where you can access how much the government of Uganda, for instance, is paying for firms to lobby the US government for favorable trade legislation. Here’s a video of Ron Nixon presenting Ujima at TEDxKampala in Uganda. Enjoy!
Also, check out this Appfrica podcast interview with Ron Nixon about the Ujima Project.