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“Without good governance, Africa will go nowhere.” This is the vision behind the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, a $400 million African initiative that aims building a better Africa by supporting civil society and democratic African leaders in the promotion of good governance. While some of the Foundation’s approaches are traditional among governance practitioners, others are less common, such as a monetary prize for sub-Saharan African leaders committed to good governance and democracy.
Unfettered Free Market, Financial Crisis and Political Backlash: How about a Market-Friendly Approach Instead?
The end of the 1980s brought about the demise of the Soviet Union and its then satellites. With the failure of socialist planning, gloating took place among some Western circles who declared absolute victory for free market capitalism.
Almost twenty years later, as we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, we are in the midst of a US-led major crisis of the Western financial system. Very different quarters are gloating now, blaming it on the failure of capitalism, and suggesting that a return to a system with socialist overtones is not only preferable, but unavoidable. Many point out that even the essence of the bailout plan, put together by a free market administration in the US, already points in that direction...!
Notebooks for school children in Burundi: Improving performance in the education sector
During my recent mission to Bujumbura, Burundi, I witnessed the rapid results initiative team in action. Earlier this March, a group of government officials participated in a training session on the use of the Rapid Results Approach to promote good governance and anti-corruption. During this training, a group of officials from the Ministry of Education decided that this method could help them to improve efficiency in their sector.
MENA Governance News and Notes
The latest issue of the World Bank governance newsletter for the Middle East and North Africa is out. "Governance News and Notes" is a monthly newsletter that seeks to "keep practitioners, legislators, academics, NGOs, members of the donor community and other interested parties informed about important developments in the field of governance and public management throughout the MENA region."
The dilemmas of measuring corruption: is there an agreement of where should we move on?
As corruption issues in the world seem to be endless, so it is the debate about the best way to develop and to use corruption indicators. Whether aggregate or disaggregated; whether actionable or not; whether perception-based or experience-based; whether they should measure inputs or outputs; and whether assessments should be locally-owned or conducted by international institutions are just some of the on-going discussions in open forums and informal chats.
The human faces of corruption
Aid Effectiveness beyond Accra: good governance & anticorruption 2010
Evidently it was Huge, and very ‘High Level’ -- the Forum on Aid Effectiveness which just ended in Accra, with 1,700 attendees. I wasn’t one of them. But I read and talk to people. The sense is that at the end of the day some promising steps may have taken place. Mark Nelson was there, blogging already about the Parallel Forum with civil society, and the main declaration points of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which was improved at the 11th hour.
What transpired at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra?
The 1700 people who came to Accra for the big aid effectiveness conference this week are packing their bags, but the agreement they managed to cobble together here looks to leave a lasting impact.
More than 100 ministers were on hand here for what many called a watershed. As I noted in an earlier posting, the Accra conference was preceded by a major conference of civil society organizations (CSOs). Then starting on Tuesday at the official conference, 82 CSOs were given seats and played a major role in the proceedings. That CSO presence, combined with a strong push from some of the official delegations here, produced an agreement that goes much further than ever before towards transparency, civil society engagement, and fostering stronger developing country leadership in the $100 billion-a-year international aid business.
Corruption warning signs: is your project at risk?
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What factors conspire to cause a development project to fail? Poor project design and management of course. Also lack of client ownership. And capacity constraints. And corruption.
Corruption puts assistance projects at risk at every step of the project’s life, and even before that projects exist on paper. "Corruption warning signs: is your project at risk?" is a toolkit recently developed by the Latin America and Caribbean unit of the World Bank that lists these pitfalls phase by phase throughout the project's life. The toolkit is addressed to Bank project managers and teams. Here's a quick synthesis of these warning signs.
Delicious Governance: Not always an Oxymoron?
Governance is integral to everyday happenings around the world. They don't always make the big headlines. Corruption, lack of transparency and accountability in government, censorship, abuse of and by the judiciary, regional conflicts and state-sponsored aggression, are some of the common manifestations of misgovernance. By contrast, there are also notable instances of good governance and integrity in many institutions around the world.
We have been blogging about many of these before, but a blog entry is one selective take on a particular issue, whether news that day or not. So we thought that it is worth also giving some broader snapshot of the governance news of the day.
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