Anti-corruption, Transparency, and Accountability

Creating institutionalized mechanisms for public participation creates space for the negotiation and inclusive political settlements necessary to provide all citizens with access to government services. We work with governments and citizens on formal and informal mechanisms to enhance the accountability of service providers. Our work in this area includes building civil society’s ability to use accountability tools such as social audits and community scorecards, working with government institutions to strengthen internal controls, and supporting strong parliamentary oversight of public expenditures and policy implementation.

DAI supports government authorities to engage more transparently with their populations on fiscal issues. We support national Open Government Plans, accession to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, access to public information, improved country scores on the Open Budget Index, and codifying Open Contracting Standards for procurement.

Under the Macro-Economic Stabilization and Reform (MESR) project in Egypt, DAI helped the Fiscal Transparency and Citizen Engagement Unit to address transparency gaps identified in the 2017 Open Budget Survey. The latest report published in April 2020 placed Egypt second in the Middle East after improvements attributed to increased access to budget figures via the Government of Egypt’s publication of the citizen’s budget and pre-budget statements that MESR supported.

The Kosovo Transparent, Effective, and Accountable Municipalities (TEAM) project significantly contributed to increased transparency of the public procurement process nationwide. DAI used Open Contracting Data Standards in the procurement process to standardize procurement data and make it more accessible to civil society, the media, and the broader private sector (not just industry insiders), developed the Open Procurement Transparency Portal, and is supporting interoperability between the e-Procurement System and the Kosovo Finance Management Information System to enable end-to-end tracing of public funds. The Kosova Democratic Institute declared that the greatest achievement of 2019 was the publication of contracts on the e-Procurement platform, with budget transparency increased by 16 percent compared to the previous year over €1.2 billion worth of procurements processed through the platform.