By Michael Moses, Director of Advocacy & Programs, May 3 2016

The OGP Africa Regional Meeting is happening in Cape Town this week. The meeting presents a great opportunity for open government champions in government and civil society to reflect on the achievements of the OGP community in Africa and find inspiration to overcome the challenges they are facing. The conference will also be a great opportunity for others to learn about the relevance of OGP and its potential to support progress toward more open government.  

Global Integrity has a busy schedule in Cape Town, building on our engagement at the Mexico Global Summit and a number of other OGP events. We will hold three sessions and participate in the Fiscal Openness Working Group’s meeting as well.

On Wednesday, May 4th, we’re leading a workshop with government points of contact to facilitate the sharing of experiences around common challenges they face in their efforts to design and implement OGP National Action Plans. Points of contact will also reflect on ways to improve their capacity to deal with those challenges. We’ll also explore how an iterative, learning-focused approach might help them to overcome obstacles as they find their way toward more open government.

On Thursday, May 5, we’re hosting a session focusing on fiscal governance. We’ve brought together a group of leading civil society organizations – including BudgIT, Public Service Accountability Monitor, the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting, Code for Africa and Open Democracy Advice Center (ODAC)  – to discuss how they track the flow of public resources in their countries and the challenges they face in doing so. After quick lightning talks, we’ll engage the audience in reflecting on: how those methods and approaches to following the money might be adapted and applied to new contexts; what obstacles might arise in particular contexts;  and how OGP National Action Plan commitments can be used to address those obstacles.

Finally, on Friday, May 6, we will lead an interactive workshop in which we’ll briefly present lessons and reflections from our groundbreaking comparative research into how OGP is playing out in practice in five different countries. That short presentation will then inform small group discussions in which session participants will discuss the extent to which the lessons identified in our case studies resonate with their own experiences, and how they could engage more effectively with the processes, spaces, and resources provided by OGP.

I’m looking forward to sharing lessons from our experience, learning from the efforts of others and to exploring opportunities for collaboration. Find me (Michael Moses) at the Meeting or send me a message.

Image taken from here.