Over a decade ago, the Accountability Initiative (AI) research group at the Centre for Policy Research in India was created to strengthen accountability and transparency in governance that is responsive to citizen need. They do this by conducting large-scale public expenditure tracking surveys on plans, budgets, and fund flows; analyzing macro-level budget trends in social sector programs; and studying the implementation capabilities of government at the frontlines of ...

https://youtu.be/9PIUIiFLWFI Katharine Knox leads the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT)’s Power and Accountability Programme where she works to strengthening democratic and corporate accountability, encourage responsible media, and support work that responds to the dual harms of the Covid-19 pandemic and systemic racism. Prior to that, she spent years researching, advocating, and leading climate justice programs. Early this summer, we sat with Katherine to disc...

World Justice Project is the convener of the World Justice Challenge, a global competition that identifies, recognize, and support innovative rule of law changemakers at the local level and bring them together to share ideas, strategies, and tactics for reform. Two of key people working on this program are Killian Dorier, WJP’s Senior Program Associate for Engagement at WJP and Ted Piccone, an expert on global democracy and human rights policies and WJP’s Chief Engagem...

  Do you know that only 1% of global funding reaches women’s organizations? No surprise then that Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds (Prospera) advocates that 10% of all gender-equality funding be directed to Women’s Funds directly over the next five years. Why is such core funding important for women’s organizations? Prospera’s Director and Deputy Director – Alexandra Garita and Ana Pecova tell us and explain the value transparency, participation,...

  Meet the brain behind Co-Impact’s Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) practice, Varja Lipovsek. As the Director of Learning, Measurement, and Evaluation at Co-Impact, Varja brings more than two decades of experience in organizational learning with civil society and public sector initiatives. Her previous stints include leading Twaweza East Africa’s MEL portfolio and working as a Research Scientist at MIT GOV/LAB, where she helped to bridge the academic a...

  The garment trade has long been plagued by opacity on sourcing, supply chain conditions, and how benefits are shared. The need to get transparency, participation, and accountability right is clear, especially in light of upcoming legislative changes in apparel market countries. Last year, Laudes Foundation published a report on the transparency journey for the Bangladesh apparel sector, noting that while transparency features heavily in industry rhetoric, the...

  While serving as an intern at the age of 14, Rachel Etter-Phoya witnessed the abduction of a journalist who has been critical of corruption in the government. Such experiences, especially those in her teen years, strongly fuelled her desire to serve society. Over the last decade, she has focused much energy on transparency and accountability in the extractives sector and more recently in taxation. Rachel currently serves as Tax Justice Network’s Senior Resear...

Courtney Tolmie is passionate about building and using evidence to advocate for change. For over 15 years, she has championed transparency, accountability, and governance research and programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America with international organizations.  At Results for Development, she leads their governance and citizen engagement practice and serves as principal investigator for their Transparency for Development programs. She is also currently a research...

  The Director of policy research for Save the Children USA, Andrew Wainer, always had an interest in how the world works. As a kid, rather than light fare, he remembers reading about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and devouring the Autobiography of Malcolm X.  This interest was reinforced by his father, who was an avid international traveler. “Not to give away my age, but I was able to visit the Soviet Union as a teenager and that really fueled my interes...

  Naomi Hossain is Bangladeshi-Irish, originally from London, but now based in Washington DC, where she work at the Accountability Research Center at American University doing the “most amazing job” – action-oriented research with activists and practitioners, and scholars to help them think through their strategies for holding authorities accountable and share what they are learning. “Through this work, we are getting much clearer on what is – and what is not –...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RLqD05QpHY What is it like fighting for transparency in the construction sector in Latin America? We spoke with Manuel Gonzalez Caballero, the Senior Regional Manager for Infrastructure Transparency Initiative (CoST)’s program in Latin America and one of the first Panamanians to work and develop construction transparency programming in the region.  Before joining CoST, Manuel helped develop the first Anti-Corruption Risk Map with...

“It’s not fair,” Suneeta Kaimal, recalls that was one of her favorite phrases as a child. Add to that her name “Suneeta,” which means justice in Sanskrit, and see why she believes she is destined for a career fighting for social justice!  Suneeta first began working in the field of natural resource governance to unseat the deep-rooted, systemic injustices that plague the oil, gas, and mineral sector.  Today, she serv...

https://youtu.be/Bq4acA_Mo24 In many parts of the world, albinism is profoundly misunderstood, socially and medically. Enter Olive Namutebi, the founder and Director of Albinism Umbrella, a Uganda-based nonprofit organization working collaboratively with communities to promote and protect the interest of people living with albinism to make the world a safer place for all. Her dream is to see a world where all persons with albinism live dignified lives and fulfill their ...

https://youtu.be/bqGbLZMVsa8 What should you do when you find a great partner to work with? “Work with that partner again,” says Ana Maria Enríquez, the Executive Director of Human Rights Funders Network (HRFN) of her Deputy, Kellea Miller. Ana Maria and Keller had worked on some human-rights-related projects in the past before fate brought them together again at HRFN to work side-by-side. Drawing on fifty years of collective experience, they are advocating and leading ...

https://youtu.be/0QfRU71Ikrk We spoke to Pat Scheid as she rounds up her tenure as a program officer in the Global Development and Population Program at Hewlett Foundation after eight years. Before joining the Foundation in 2013, Pat managed teams and portfolio of grants supporting youth employability, education, and leadership development in Africa. She once worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, where she focused on women’s empowerment.  Pat is interested...

  https://youtu.be/9yYw54sQ82M John Hawkins is a specialist in infrastructure governance, having worked in the sector for over 20 years and authored several publications looking at issues of corruption, procurement, and social development within the infrastructure sector.  John has been involved in the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST) since it was launched as a pilot in 2008 with eight participating countries. He managed the UK pilot. H...

https://youtu.be/EVdfFOGRVAk Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Mario Picon’s initial career plan was to be a macroeconomist and financial programming expert, but a series of field experiences in the Amazon area and the Andes sent him in a different direction, and he has never looked back. Today, he serves as the Program Director of the Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption initiative at Results for Development (R4D). Welcome Mario! Please tell us more about yours...

It’s great catching up with ex-TAIer, Brendan Halloran - governance learning expert. Brendan currently serves as the Head of Strategy and Learning (with a focus on fiscal governance) at the International Budget Partnership where he continues to work on the intersection of strategy and learning around governance issues. We spoke with Brendan on what learning looks like amid a pandemic, the obstacles of putting learning into action, and new adaptations to monitoring, eva...

https://youtu.be/bqjVdbnJ5D0 Jorge Florez is the Senior program manager and activist at Global Integrity, where he generates insights about approaches to use data to fight corruption and improve service delivery and ways to bring the voices and perspectives of country partners into global decision making. His interest around transparency, civic participation, and accountability issues began with trying to understand the reason for violence in Colombia. “I was trying ...

Elisa Peter has lived and worked in eight countries driving international policy processes in the field of transparency, civic participation, accountability, sustainable development, climate change, human rights and peace/security. This includes championing land and environmental rights in an indigenous arctic community and designing and facilitating senior-level political strategies for an eminent group of 12 former Heads of State and Nobel Peace Prize laureates on cl...

Munyema Hasan began her career in South Asia, where she worked with marginalized groups to understand where governments were failing to deliver, and why. Ten years on, she serves as the Deputy Director of Learning and Impact at the Open Government Partnership where she work with over fifty global staff to help government and civil society reformers design problem-driven, agile, and politically astute approaches to policy-making. Here, she shares insights into the impor...

Ever wondered what it is like to work in a donor collaborative or to try and bridge the world between funders and grantees? Wonder no more! We sat with Alison Miranda, our (outgoing) Head of Learning and Impact. We spoke about her experience of leading learning strategy and monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practice at TAI, some of the unique elements of learning in a collaborative setting, and what happens when learning leads us in a surprising direction. We ...

https://youtu.be/CpI1JPoMOe0   All his life, Joseph Asunka has been particular about getting government to be more attentive and responsive to citizens. The reason is close to home. Growing up in rural Ghana, he never experienced governance in his formative years. “It felt like there was no way you could engage directly with government officials in ways that allow you to ask for services within your community,” he recalls. Joseph continues to be motivated by ...

As a freelancer and in-house editor with Dragonfly Editorial, Cynthia Williams has enjoyed working with many organizations in the transparency, accountability, and civic space arena. In addition to Transparency and Accountability Initiative, she has worked with Common Cause, Open Government Partnership, Public Citizen, Thousand Currents, and others to advance work in the public interest. Recently, she worked on reports that assess open data initiatives in Afghanista...

https://youtu.be/kHCTB6HfJoE   Anti-corruption activist Hamzat Lawal has led grassroots campaigns in over eight African countries – including Nigeria. These range from monitoring the distribution of 9.2 billion clean cookstoves supplied by the federal government to rural women to advocating for the necessary funds to save 1,500 sick children affected by lead poisoning in Bagega Zamfara. Follow the Money; the pan-African grassroots data-driven movement Hamzat fou...

https://youtu.be/LmM9yxDEMxg   Transparency and accountability are important tools necessary to achieve personal and collective objectives in social development. But how do we judiciously use these tools to aid project delivery? “It starts with getting the information out there in accurate and accessible ways,” says Ford Foundation Senior Program Officer for Mexico and Central America, Ivana Fertziger. We spoke with Ivana on the principles around ensuring tra...

Human rights lawyer and Senior Program Officer on MacArthur Foundation’s On Nigeria program, Yvonne Darkwa-Poku, joins us on the TPA Full Disclosure series to discuss human rights, civic participation, and strengthening civic participation. What we heard:                                    ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSa1tao0WiU Luminate Investment Principal Stan Getui helps source and manage Luminate’s grants and investments in Africa. He was previously a strategy consultant with Dalberg Advisors, where he focused on inclusive finance and ICT and Investment for Development. Listen now to hear our discussion around anti-corruption drive fatigue in Africa and how grantee organizations are moving the needle to build solutions that apply to the countr...

https://youtu.be/RkX5blSRzPA Fiscal transparency advocate and confessed “accidental” development worker, Oluseun Onigbide, is a firm believer in the power of open data and tech for social change. As the Co-founder and Director of BudgIT, a civic organization that workers to foster social change through technology, citizen engagement, and institutional improvement, Oluseun and his team use co-creation mechanisms, tweets, and infographics to simplify policy project, track...

https://youtu.be/884DfmCipU4 When Ximena Andión Ibañez started working at one of the mainstream human rights organizations in Mexico some twenty years ago, she encountered various cases that have to do with Gender-Based Violence (GBV), especially those in the northern region of Mexico, which involved the killing and disappearance of women and girls. But her organization’s work didn’t include gender equality, so she pushed very hard for women's issues to be part of the o...

https://youtu.be/EOIOshlPYbE After a failed attempt to become a strong corporate lawyer, Tomás Chang Pico firmly decided to make a career out of his true passion: building a better world free from poverty, inequality, and all forms of discrimination.   Now, he works as a Programme Officer for the Built Environment Programme at the Laudes Foundation. Previously, he served as the portfolio manager of the Voice-funded multi-country (or global) projects (b...

https://youtu.be/cB6mq2p6K6k “One of the biggest challenges in this fight against corruption is taking complex ideas and distilling it down to a point where people can support reforms designed to attack these problems,” says Frank Brown, the Director of the Anti-Corruption & Governance Center at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). As the Director of the Center, Frank work around anti-corruption compliance and leverage that to get local compani...

Chris Chibwana leads IDinsight’s partnerships with African governments and African philanthropy to support data-driven development on the continent. Prior to joining IDInsight, he worked with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, International Food Policy Research Institute, and USAID as a researcher on different data policy design and implementation. In this interview, we discussed the nitty-gritty of using data for evidence and what progress looks l...

Dr. Wilson Prichard is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and CEO of the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD). His research focuses on the relationship between taxation and citizen demands for improved governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. We engaged Wilson further on his work on taxation and political economy in sub-Saharan Africa and the growing engagement of civil society organ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDl_riUMM0 Some 20 years ago, a transparent and open government was inconceivable in a country like Georgia. Today, with the work of organizations like the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI), it’s possible.   Founded by two historians/ researchers – Levan Avalishvili and Giorgi Kldiashvili, IDFI work towards strengthening good governance, promoting citizen participation in decision making, enhanc...

https://youtu.be/3EYay6700Tw “White men from the global north dominate the TPA sector. One of the challenges is navigating that space as a woman and from the global south,” says Alfonsina Peñaloza, program officer at Hewlett Foundation. At the Foundation, Alfonsina manages two portfolios: (i) transparency, participation, and accountability, and (ii) the women and economic empowerment portfolios.  She concedes that there has been some progress in gender equali...

Amina Salihu is a woman of many paths. She is a feminist, a farmer, a philanthropist, and a veteran in the Transparency, Civic Participation, and Accountability (TPA) field. She has been working on TPA issues for almost 30 years and currently serves as a Senior Program Manager at the MacArthur Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, Amina served as Senior Special Assistant on Information and Strategy (2004 – 2007) to the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FC...

What lessons can those versed in other sectors bring into the transparency, civic participation, and accountability (TPA) field? This week on “Full Disclosure – the People behind TPA” interview series; Global Director of Learning at Accountability Lab, Cheri-Leigh Erasmus share insights and lessons from bridging across different development communities. Cheri-Leigh has spent a decade in the higher education and development arenas. In her current position at Accountabili...

Our guest on this week’s “Full Disclosure – the People behind TPA” interview series is Isabelle Kermeen, a communications professional with a background in humanitarian and development communications and advocacy as well as in accountability.  She serves as the Communications Manager for Integrity Action, an organization that helps citizens monitor the delivery of vital projects and services where they live and solve the problems they find. Great to have y...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ9EyWGnTtI&t=1s When we talk about participation in the civic space, we really have to ask ourselves, “who’s invited to participate, and does that mean participation for all?” says Amira El-Sayed, Principal on global Civic Empowerment grants and investments at Luminate. “When we stand up or stand-in for participation, we also have to protect the freedom NOT to participate. When a group of people oppose a system or oppose a process...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xY_DlW93mM “We need to concentrate more on policies and practices of institutions, including government institutions in terms of tax rules,” says Open Society Foundations’ program officer, Savior Mwambwa. Savior, a 17 years veteran in the tax field, works with the Foundations’ Economic Justice program, leading a portfolio on tax and inequality. This involves working with partners and civil society and non-civil society groups trying t...

From student activism to human rights lawyer and now a global program officer on Civic Engagement and Government at the Ford Foundation, Otto Saki has provided technical assistance to civil society, government ministries, and government agencies across sub-Saharan Africa on legislative reforms and other law-related matters. At Ford Foundation, Otto's work covers a strategic driven portfolio of grantees working with regional mechanisms, business, human rights, women's ri...

We continue to shed more light on individual and collective work foundation directors, program officers, and grantees are doing around Transparency, Civic Participation, and Accountability (TPA). Our next guest is Tim Hanstad, the Chief Executive Officer of Chandler Foundation. Tim joined Chandler Foundation after more than two decades of leading Landesa, the world’s leading land-rights organization, from a two-person team to a leading global NGO with more than 20 offic...

We are excited to launch a short interview series that features Transparency, Civic Participation, and Accountability (TPA) foundation directors, program and communications officers, and grantees. The “Full Disclosure” series is designed to humanize and shed more light on the collective work they help advance and celebrate individual commitments and tenacity towards building a better society.  Our first guest is Sarah Jane Staats, an independent global communicati...