The International Budget Partnership (IBP) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, formerly a project of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It is governed by a Board of Trustees that includes:
- David Nussbaum has led several high-profile international organizations, including The Elders, WWF-UK and Transparency International. He brings wide expertise in the accountability field, as well as strategic visioning and planning that will help us evolve organizationally and connect the relevance of open budget work to other global development actors, including the environmental, anticorruption and humanitarian communities. Watch David in action talking about one of his passions: climate change.
- Dr. Faith Mwangi-Powell MSc, PhD currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer for Girls not Brides – the global partnership to end child marriage – where she is responsible for catalyzing its partnership strategy and ensuring that the Secretariat is responsive to the broader movement for change. She formerly served as Global Director for The Girl Generation, an initiative working to galvanize the Africa-led movement to end Female Genital Mutilation. Faith is a public health expert and senior manager of complex public health programs in Africa with more than 20 years of experience in leading, managing and implementing health programs. She was the founding Executive Director of the African Palliative Care Association and supported palliative care global advocacy and services development in over 20 African countries.
- Jane Ellison is a consultant who works from London, advising cultural institutions and higher education on public engagement, editorial strategies, partnerships and collaboration. A former senior executive at the BBC, she headed the broadcaster’s work to build partnerships and deliver ambitious creative projects with arts organisations, museums, libraries and universities.Past roles include TV producer, financial journalist, programme maker and commissioner for factual programmes at Radio 4, the BBC’s flagship speech radio network. Jane is a Trustee of Libraries Connected, a sector support organisation for public libraries in England. She holds advisory roles at the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Royal Opera House and Transparency International UK. She has written on partnerships and collaboration in the creative industries.
- Julie McCarthy is director of the Open Society Fiscal Governance Program. From 2011 to 2012, she served as director of the support unit at the Open Government Partnership, and prior to that, she was a senior adviser at the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, working with the Obama administration and the Brazilian government to develop and launch the Open Government Partnership. In 2009, McCarthy was selected as a Franklin Fellow and Peacebuilding Adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, helping to launch a multimillion dollar peacebuilding program in Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy directed the Open Society Foundations’ Revenue Watch Program and then cofounded the Revenue Watch Institute, serving as its deputy director until 2009. She was also previously the researcher/writer for the Open Society Foundations’ award-winning Iraq Revenue Watch Project, and coordinated the Open Society Foundations work on the Millennium Challenge Account. McCarthy has a BA in philosophy from Cornell University and an MA in international relations from Yale University.
- Malado Kaba served as the first and only female Finance Minister of the Republic of Guinea between 2016 and 2018. During that time, she reached record macroeconomic results and was instrumental in leading key strategic negotiations to secure more than USD20 billion for Guinea’s ambitious infrastructure programme. She also contributed to improve Guinea’s international image and relations with investors, international partners and the civil society. She led actions to increase fiscal transparency, fight corruption and promote good governance and sound administration. Prior to her ministerial position, she was country head for Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in Guinea advising leaders and senior officials in Government on both policy and programme implementation. Before that, she worked as an economist for the European Commission.
- Maria Gracia P. Tan is the Chairman of the UN Independent Audit Advisory Committee for 2018. She was formerly the Chairperson of the Philippine SAI (Commission on Audit), and introduced the Citizen Participatory Audit (CPA) as a priority program for citizen engagement in public audit. This program won the Bright Spot award in the Open Government Summit in London in 2013. A staunch advocate of government accountability and transparency, she is credited with the audit on the pork barrel which led to the Philippine Supreme Court declaring it unconstitutional and the indictment of several high level legislators for graft and plunder. Prior to the Commission on Audit, she served as Undersecretary of Finance for Revenue Operations, exercising oversight of the internal revenue and customs services. She was also Commissioner of Good Government, the agency tasked with recovering the Marcos ill-gotten wealth. She is a lawyer and a certified public accountant by profession and established, with her husband, the Tan Venturanza Valdez law offices in the Philippines. She obtained her LlM in Tax from New York University as a Gerald Wallace scholar, and her degrees in law and accountancy from the University of the Philippines where she is also a professor in tax.
- Michael Lipsky, an emeritus member of the Board and founding two-term Board Chair, retired in 2018 as a distinguished senior fellow at Demos. Before that, he served for 12 years as a program officer in the Peace and Social Justice program of the Ford Foundation. Responsible for the foundation’s portfolio on “government performance and accountability,” he helped create the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative (now the State Priorities Partnership), a national network of organizations devoted to budget transparency and accountability, as well as the International Budget Partnership. Prior to Ford, Michael taught political science at the University of Wisconsin, and, for 21 years, was a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His best-known books are Protest in City Politics; Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (with S.R. Smith); and the award-winning Street-Level Bureaucracy. He holds degrees from Oberlin College and Princeton University.
- Rakesh Rajani, Board Chair, is the Vice President of Programs at Co-Impact, a philanthropic platform to support system change investments in the global south and a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development. Until May 2018 he served as the Director of Civic Engagement and Government program at the Ford Foundation in New York, responsible for U.S. and global work on voting rights, democratic participation, taxes and budgets, and protecting civic space. From 2008 to 2014 he founded and served as the Head of Twaweza, an East African organization that promotes citizen agency, open government, and basic education. He is also a founding member and past co-chair of the Open Government Partnership, which involves 75 countries covering more than two billion people. From 2001 to 2007 Rakesh served as the founding executive director of HakiElimu, Tanzania’s leading citizen engagement and education advocacy organization. He has also played key roles in establishing the Foundation for Civil Society, the Tanzania Media Fund, Policy Forum and other civil society platforms in Tanzania. He has consulted on issues related to education, human rights and governance for Google.org, the Hewlett Foundation, Hivos and UNICEF, among others. Rakesh serves on several national and international boards and was a fellow of Harvard University from 1998 to 2013. He has written and edited over 400 papers and popular publications in English and Swahili. Rakesh holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and English and American literature from Brandeis University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
- Sofía Sprechmann is Secretary General at CARE International, a leading poverty-fighting and humanitarian response organization committed to social justice and gender equality. Sofia has worked for CARE since 1994 in several positions, providing leadership and support to programs in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. In particular, she has extensive experience in gender, impact studies, evidence-based policy advocacy, partnership and participation. She has a deep and broad understanding of alliances and networks that collaborate in the fight against poverty, of key issues and trends in approaches to development, and of the underlying causes of poverty and rights denial. Sofia is passionate about addressing gender inequality, having worked alongside some of the most discriminated-against and abused women to support their struggles, such as domestic workers, women working in the garment sector and survivors of gender-based violence. Throughout her career, she has shown an unshakeable commitment to the rights and participation of the people from the most marginalized, excluded and discriminated-against communities. Prior to her work in international development, Sofía worked as a Sociologist in the field of public opinion polls and audience research in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from the Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay and an MSc in Epidemiology from the University of London/London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Sofia is from Uruguay.
- Tim Dixon is the co-founder of More in Common, an initiative to counter the growing threats to open and inclusive societies in Europe and the United States. Since 2010 he has co-founded seven social movement organizations, including social change agency Purpose Europe, civil protection and democracy group The Syria Campaign, and peace advocacy and citizen engagement group Movilizatorio in Colombia. He has also worked on initiatives to combat modern day slavery, promote gun control in the U.S., reduce inequality, and engage faith communities in social justice issues. Tim trained as an economist and tech sector lawyer at Baker & McKenzie. Between 2007 and 2010 he was the chief speechwriter and senior economic adviser for Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and was responsible for developing the Australian Labor Party platform for two successive elections. In his twenties he founded an educational publishing business, Leading Edge Education, which was acquired by Pearson in 2004. He is the co-author of Australia’s two best-selling economics textbooks. Tim also serves on the boards of Purpose Europe, The Syria Campaign, the Chifley Research Centre and faith-based justice organization Sojourners (U.S.).