Twaweza’s Head Rakesh Rajani, who also serves as the co-chair of the Open Government Partnership, attended both of these events to try to promote a fairer deal for the developing world and to advocate for the power of open. See press release and photo.

Subsequently, Rajani and John Githongo (CEO, Inuka Kenya Trust) have written an open letter to David Cameron in the final hours before a deal is reached and a communiqué issued. The letter called for the following key measures to ensure that the developing world can also benefit from the transparency bonanza.
1. Publicly available registers of companies to cut down on the corrupt abuse of secret companies.
2. Automatic exchange of tax information to crack down on evasion and avoidance by multinational companies. Read the letter

STOP PRESS: The G8 meeting declaration can be found here. Judge for your self how much progress was made.

Tisne emphasizes that the OGP is not a group of well-governed nations. Instead the OGP sets a low bar for entry and incentivises improvements.
With this in mind, Tisne, who help to found the OGP, goes on to suggest some key pillars or rules of the game. He is particularly emphatic about civil society participation. OGP represents a new way of approaching governance specifically because the participation of civil society is seen as integral to the process with a seat at the same table as the government. According to Tisne, however, the guidance for civil society involvement is unreflective of this principle. The role of civil society is only articulated in the production of country action plans, whereas there are many other avenues to pursue, including in implementation of the plans.

Tisne also goes on to highlight the role of the Independent Reporting Mechanism , the need for a relevance check for the country action plan once it is complete and clarity on the definitions of the targets for OGP national plans – which should be innovative and stretch countries’ capabilities.

Read the post and comment

Martin Tisne is a steering committee member of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and the Open Government Partnership, as well as a board member of Publish What You Fund. He holds a BA from the University of Oxford and an MSc from the London School of Economics.Follow him on Twitter: @martintisne
 

So when a member of the Programs team in Tanzania found this music video, we felt compelled to share. It's great to see others getting behind the idea of citizen agency, and the message resonates strongly with our recent ni sisi campaign.

We will be looking increasingly at working with artists and may try to get in touch with M 'n' S.

The idea was to get a glimpse of life as it is lived in much of rural East Africa. Although we know that we cannot draw generalisations from our experiences, immersion aims to open our eyes to the lived realities of the people whom we seek to target in our work. Some of it was sobering, there were a number of instances of Uwezo calendars being used as little more than wallpaper, and some was uplifting – the evening news was a source of discussion and debate, and information passed from person to person quickly and efficiently.

As we made our way back to the meeting point for our de-brief session, each of us came with our own ideas on our experiences and how they relate to our work. We then spent a day together swapping stories but also trying to think through what it all could mean for Twaweza and Uwezo and the work that we do. Our imaginations were collectively sparked – from leveraging the phenomenal reach and distribution network of Miraa (a hallucinogenic substance that is legal in Kenya and grown largely for export to Somalia) to engaging in local levels sports events, new ideas were plentiful. Over the coming weeks we will work to distill lessons, write reports and take on board new thinking. But for now, all of us are left with a lot of gratitude towards our hosts, who allowed us unique access to their lives, and an overwhelming sense of the magnitude of what we learned and experienced, and the work that we still need to do.

See photos on Flikr (below) or Facebook.

Our approach involves staff from Twaweza and a partner organization spending three nights and three days with a previously identified host family, sleeping in their homes, sharing meals and life as it is lived, having long conversations often late into the evening. Staff members participate in community living unencumbered by normal professional roles and hierarchies, with no pretense to profer solutions or help 'bring development'. This type of participation offers a chance to scrutinize our personal and professional assumptions about development and the lives of ordinary citizens: a chance to listen to people’s perspectives and observe the mechanisms people employ to thrive and survive. In our experience so far, families respond with great generosity and curiosity, as interested in our varied lives as we are in theirs. Our internal note with further details is attached below. Photos and reports will be shared soon.

And somehow, we hope, that the immersion will complement our other monitoring and evaluation activities to help us better think through, adapt and evaluate our work.

For Twaweza and Uwezo, who have long been calling for this re-orientation of education policy-making, the report is a welcome addition to the growing body of research that echoes our findings.

“For the last ten years, the major focus of the global education community has been on getting children into school. And that effort has been a success: most of the world’s children live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary completion by 2015.

But behind that progress is a problem—one that grows with each additional child that walks through the classroom door. Some children in those classes are learning nothing. Many more are learning a small fraction of the syllabus. They complete primary school unable to read a paragraph, or do simple addition, or tell the time. They are hopelessly ill-equipped for secondary education or almost any formal employment. The crisis of learning is both deep and widespread. It is a crisis for children, too many of whom leave school believing they are failures. And it is a crisis for their communities and countries, because economic analysis suggests it is what workers know—not their time in school—that makes them more productive and their economies more prosperous.

Fixing the learning crisis will take systemic reform stretching beyond the education sector. It will take teachers, headmasters, and education officials with the mandate to focus on learning. And it will take those officials being held accountable for learning outcomes by informed stakeholders including parents, parliamentarians, and employers.

Assessment regimes are a central part of this reform effort. They can provide evidence on the scale of the learning crisis as a lever for reform. They can track progress on improvements and provide the evidence base for what works. They empower parents to demand better outcomes—or move their kids to where they can find them.”