The Open Government Partnership began with a promise. In 2011, at the United Nations, eight governments and nine civil society leaders came together around a simple but ambitious idea: that governments become more effective and earn greater public trust when they are more open and responsive to their citizens.
They invited reformers around the world to join them in advancing transparency, public participation, accountability, and innovation as practical ways to make that promise a reality. They believed this would help governments work better, fight corruption, and rebuild trust between governments and the people they serve.
Fifteen years later, the experience of OGP members shows that this promise is being delivered. Across countries and communities, openness has strengthened institutions, improved public services, fought corruption, and delivered reforms that endure. The work is far from complete but the evidence, as this report shows, is compelling: open government delivers better government.
This is how OGP works. We create the conducive conditions (including openness, inclusion, and independent accountability) that enable governments to pursue stronger, more durable reforms than they would attempt alone. Sustained across election cycles, these reforms improve how countries are governed and how people live. Reformers in government and citizens outside it work together to drive these changes. The conditions created by OGP are what make them succeed and endure.
The evidence bears this out. Eight countries passed their first ever right to information legal frameworks through OGP. When the United Kingdom opened a public register of who really owns companies, it was the first to do so through an OGP action plan. Today two in five OGP countries publish that data, against one in eight elsewhere. According to Nigeria’s anti-corruption authorities, the country used its own register to recover more than a hundred million dollars in stolen assets and to exit the Financial Action Task Force grey list.
At the local level, OGP is enabling public participation where government decisions touch citizens directly. For example, complaint response times were halved in San Pedro Garza García, Mexico, and contracts for school lunches were awarded to small, women-led agricultural businesses for the first time in Palmira, Colombia.
Ukraine offers the clearest proof of what this cooperation can achieve. Its open contracting system, ProZorro, was co-created by reformers inside and outside the government. Held to independent scrutiny through successive OGP commitments, it has survived changes of government and saved billions of dollars that would otherwise have been lost to waste and corruption. Finland’s award-winning State Procurement Portal, Tutki Hankintoja, was inspired by Ukraine’s example.
Fifty-seven OGP member countries have passed, amended, or strengthened legislation on beneficial ownership, open contracting, fiscal openness, public participation, or the right to information. Today, ninety percent of OGP member countries have involved the parliament, judiciary, or local governments in open government initiatives.
The stakes are higher now than ever. Trust in public institutions is eroding. Space for citizens to organize and speak is shrinking. The information people need for self-government is poisoned to divide them. New technologies are reworking what governments can do faster than governments can guide them. None of these challenges can be met by governments or citizens acting alone. They demand cooperation on a scale the world has not faced before. Never has the case for open government been made more urgently, nor contested more fiercely, than right now.
Fostering cooperation between those inside and outside the government is precisely the skill that OGP has spent fifteen years cultivating and showing that it delivers stronger, more durable reforms. Behind every commitment lies a hard-won achievement: the practiced habit of people with competing interests working openly toward shared goals that neither could achieve alone.
In the years ahead, we will apply this habit to three key frontiers. We will strengthen inclusive, resilient institutions by protecting civic space, upholding the rule of law, and restoring integrity to public information. These are the foundations of meaningful cooperation. We will advance democratic digital governance, so artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and data rights are governed openly by and for the people they affect. And we will pursue shared and sustainable prosperity by bringing company ownership, public contracts, and policy-influencing financial flows into the light.
OGP’s proposition from fifteen years ago works. Today’s stakes are high and the challenges daunting. Meeting them requires what OGP has built: cooperation between citizens and governments.
Let us do it, together, at the scale that this moment demands.
Aidan Eyakuze
Chief Executive Officer, Open Government Partnership