OGP in the News – Week of August 8, 2016

A series providing a round-up of media attention received by the Open Government PartnershipThe Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multi-stakeholder initiative focused on improving government transparency, ensuring opportunities for citizen participation in public matters, and strengthen... More throughout the world.

This week, the most significant press coverage related to OGP came out of Latin America. In Argentina, a piece in the leading La Nación discussed the release of the country’s updated 2015-2017 National Action Plan. It described the government’s hope to become one of the “top ten” most transparent countries in the world, as well as a variety of openness-related commitments – such as a new web portal for searching government information – aimed at moving in this direction.

“To govern is to speak the truth and, because of this, we are committed to a policy of Open Government, which has gone from being an initiative of a single ministry to being a policy of the State,” said [Minister of Modernization Andrés] Ibarra. In its second phase, the Open Government Plan had the supervision and participation of the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative of 70 countries that promotes transparency. The Government and the participants in this Partnership worked on 15 commitments that were agreed upon in “working groups” organized in the first half of the year.

In neighboring Paraguay, a major news item concerned an invitation extended to President Horacio Cartes to attend the Global Summit in Paris in December. Invited by French President Françoise Hollande, articles on Cartes’ forthcoming participation ran in Spanish-language outlets such as Terra, La Nación of Paraguay, Caracol Radio of Colombia, Paraguay.com, and at least a dozen others.

In Mexico, comments on OGP made during a recent report given in front of the Mexican Senate made their way into a comparable number of sources – including Radio Fórmula, Terra México and 20 Minutos. Ximena Puentes, president of the county’s chief transparencyAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, transparency occurs when “government-held information (including on activities and decisions) is open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the pub... More agency, highlighted the boost that OGP had given to the fight for a more open society through such means as local co-creation of plans.

Across the Atlantic, in Africa, OGP also featured in stories from the Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and Nigeria. Les Dépêches de Brazzaville and AllAfrica.com reported on an August 7 statement by the “Junior Chamber of NGOs” in the Republic of the Congo, urging the government to take ownership of an effort to get the country to participate in the OGP Global Summit in December, saying that “the values ​​of our new Republic align with this international initiative. The Congo has everything to gain in this process.”

In Tanzania, OGP entered the conversation on tense relations between political parties in an article in The Citizen, which was also reproduced in AllAfrica.com. And in Nigeria, an op-ed on “killing corruption with people power” appeared in Business Day, The Cable and TheWill Nigeria and made reference to OGP.

Elsewhere in the world, OGP made it into plenty of other news this week. Paperblog featured a piece from the Center for International Private Enterprise on the recent White House Summit on Global Development and United States Ambassador Samantha Power’s comments on OGP. In Indonesia, two pieces from the important online news outlet Tribunnews.com as well as in Tempo.co discussed the subnational pilot project in the regency of Bojonegoro. In Italy, an article on public consultations for the country’s third National Action Plan appeared the website of ARPAT (the Environmental Protection Agency for the Region of Tuscany). Finally, in New Zealand, the announcement of a new policy framework on open source software was reported on in Scoop; the article made reference the country’s commitments, as an OGP member, to “harness the power of new technologies to make government more effective and accountable.”

And last but not least, from the world of social media, let’s all give a high-five for five years!

Of course, we can’t catch everything in our news round-ups, so if you see we’ve missed something or think a particular story ought to be featured, please send it to alex.vedovi@opengovpartnership.org.