IBP News

• Latest IBP Newsletter (Jan-Feb) with articles on citizen participation in Latin America, technology and open budget data, as well as new publications, job postings, and more.
• New brief and infographic on Kenya’s Division of Revenue Bill for 2014 featuring tables with sectoral breakdown of revenue allocations.
• New blog post on whether sub-Saharan African governments are publishing the comprehensive budget data that CSOs need to carry out independent and credible analysis.

News from Around the World

• The Good Governance Summit held by the Philippines in January brought together local government officials and civil society groups to examine the performance of local governments on corruption and transparency issues.
• A  plan to formulate a new budget management and fiscal accountability law by the ruling coalition in Nepal.
• The U.S. has been accepted as a candidate country for the EITI ( Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative) and has three years to achieve compliance.

Blogs and Commentaries

• Rebecca Simson, blogging at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), highlights the troubling trend of haphazard and incomplete publishing of budget data in Africa.
• A post at Open Contracting highlights the new initiative to establish an Open Contracting Data Standard that will link aid data, budget data, and service delivery results to help improve the transparency of international aid flows.
• Global Integrity, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Electoral Integrity Project announce the new Money, Politics, and Transparency Project and are currently soliciting for researches and reviewers.
• Lysa John writes that efforts leading up to the post-2015 development agenda are failing to incorporate viable strategies to enhance public engagement and institutional capacity at the national level which will temper the advances of the “data revolution.”
• Feature post on the The Enhancing Transparency Impact (ETI) Project in the Philippines; a two-year initiative that aims to enhance the impact of citizen actions toward transparency and good governance through grant-giving and knowledge sharing.
• An ODI paper analyzes the Tanzania National Climate Change Finance Analysis and suggests actions that could improve the effective delivery of climate finance.

Open Government Partnership (OGP) Updates

• OGP updates from Azerbaijan, Peru, Georgia, and the U.S.