Beneficial Ownership Transparency – Assessing Funder Contributions

Final Report July 2021

Beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) is increasingly recognized as an integral element of anti-corruption and tax justice efforts – a far cry from a decade ago when the concept was still little recognized and very limited in practice. 

Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI) funder members have supported advocates for BOT around the globe. Going back to 2013, we estimate that TAI members have granted around $35 million to organizations advocating for beneficial ownership transparency. It prompted us to ask what factors enabled this series of policy wins and what role did funders play in the process? 

We therefore partnered with Intention 2 Impact to conduct an evaluation. The primary purpose of the evaluation was to understand how, if at all, TAI members contributed to select policy outcomes and to examine the system of enabling and hindering factors surrounding these outcomes. (It was not assessing performance of TAI member grantees, nor does it measure the impact of BOT policies).

Please explore the resulting products. We hope you find them useful not just to funders but the good governance field more broadly.  We intend to utilize the learnings to inform future funding specific to BOT, but also to guide other global advocacy programming. 

Please explore the full report, mini case studies for each of the 8 selected policy outcomes, and a methods not reflecting on the challenge of evaluating contribution to global norms development.

EVALUATION REPORT

The final report synthesizes results from a document review; grantee surveys; in-depth interviews with funder members, grantees, and external stakeholders; and a focus group with the TAI Secretariat. Findings articulate how the select BOT policy outcomes were achieved, focusing specifically on TAI funder roles and contributions, grantee strategies, enabling factors, barriers, and additional outcomes.