[open-government] Open Society Foundations Launch New Initiative to Step Up Fight for Transparency

[Julia Keserű]

http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/press-releases/open-society-foundations-launch-new-initiative-step-fight-transparency

Open Society Foundations Launch New Initiative to Step Up Fight for
Transparency
June 15, 2013
Open Society Foundations Launch New Initiative to Step Up Fight for
Transparency

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LONDON—The Open Society Foundations on Friday launched a $10 million
Transparency Champions Challenge to empower reformers around the world to
improve government responsiveness and accountability.

The Open Society pledge of new resources to support the efforts of civil
society and government transparency champions hinges on other governments,
companies, and/or private foundations coming forward with similar
commitments, with the goal of raising $50 million by 2014.

Through international efforts such as the Open Government Partnership, the
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and recent legislation in
the U.S. and EU that forces oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose
payments to producing countries, there is an unprecedented amount of new
information about government revenues and expenditures being placed in the
public domain.

Under UK leadership, this year’s G8 Summit may further increase global
disclosure around land transactions, foreign aid, government budgets,
taxation, anonymous shell companies, and public contracting.

Making more information available about the money that governments receive
and spend is an essential first step in helping improve development results
and democratic governance. The Transparency Champions Challenge will help
translate this increased transparency into real accountability, by
supporting a wide range of citizen and government efforts to ensure that
people actually use this new information to promote more responsive and
effective governance.

“Governments and corporations around the world are beginning to release
unprecedented amounts of information about their revenues and expenses, but
most citizens will never benefit from this new transparency unless someone
interprets and publicizes the information disclosed,” Chris
Stone<http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/people/chris-stone>,
president of the Open Society Foundations, said. “It is critical that civil
society is able to build the tools and capacity to effectively engage
citizens on budgetary matters, and citizens are able to monitor and
influence how decisions about public resources are made.”

In recent years, many innovative citizen- and government-led efforts have
taken advantage of increased transparency to help improve government
effectiveness and accountability:

   - Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan *(*MKSS), an Indian NGO, has used paint
   on hundreds of mud walls across India to track rural peasants’ annual
   entitlements to wage labor employment in the absence of access to the
   government’s online tracking mechanism.
   - In Mexico, activists at the NGO Fundar use budget research and
   advocacy to increase allocations for maternal mortality and improve the
   quality of maternal health services.
   - In the Philippines, the government is using participatory social
   audits to directly involve citizens in monitoring local public
   infrastructure projects.
   - In Tanzania, the government is preparing its first citizens' budget
   document to explain in plain language how public resources are spent.

By supporting these types of efforts, the Open Society Foundations and
other potential partners to the Transparency Champions Challenge can help
build and sustain a powerful global constituency for government and
corporate transparency.

“Around the world, anticorruption activists and government reformers are
standing up to those few bad actors in the public and private sector who
collude to rob the poorest people of the funds they need to fight poverty
and hunger,” Jamie Drummond, co-founder of the ONE campaign, said. “This
Transparency Champions Challenge will give financial and political support
to these courageous campaigners and transform our talk of a transparency
revolution into a reality.”

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*The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant
democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. Working
with local communities in more than 100 countries, the Open Society
Foundations support justice and human rights, freedom of expression, and
access to public health and education.*

-- 
Júlia Keserű
International Program Coordinator

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
(1) 202-742-1520 *280

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