Quality Of Wb Funding To Africa Critical As Quantity

African leaders must grab this opportunity to push the World Bank to adapt and massively scale-up such bottom-up, citizen-centric accountability mechanismsand push more broadly to mainstream citizen engagement in everything the bank does, both in relation to climate change and other development priorities.

This will require a renewal and significant strengthening its 10-year-old citizen engagement commitment and expanding funding and staffing of related activities. Bigger is not always better if it leaves people behind.

Kenya is also the co-chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a large-scale effort across more than 75 countries and 150-plus local governments to co-create and translate commitments made by governments into action at the national and sub-national levels.

The Nairobi summit also brings together leaders from many OGP participating countries that have a central role to play in solving the continents challenges, including Nigeria, South Africa and Morocco.

African countries have made more than 600 commitments to open up their governments through OGP over the past decade or so, leading to critical reforms across the continent. In Nigeria, for example, a commitment to establish a public registry of company ownership now allows civil society to access data and identify potential compliance risks. The Seychelles delivered on its commitment to submit a comprehensive report to the Fisheries Transparency Initiative, becoming the first country to do so.

In Morocco, regional governments are using their OGP membership to, working with citizen groups, identify local priorities for transparency in local government spending. In Kenya, the government and civil society have a long history of co-creating reforms to deliver transparency in contracts and procurement, developing a national database of contracts that fully complies with the Open Contracting Data Standard.

These and many other efforts like them have improved the lives of citizensbolstering revenue collection, opening up information and reinvigorating social contracts between citizens and their leaders. Donor governments have, in their pivot towards a localised model for development assistance, supported these efforts generously because they know that OGP has time and again proven itself to deliver tremendous returns on investment in terms of outcomes.

Kenya, which will host a ministerial-level OGP regional meeting in late August, is in a strong position to connect the dotsdomestically and across the continentbetween IDA21 and tools like OGP that can ensure a central role for civil society in solving development challenges. Unless and until governments and civil society can align development efforts in ways that streamline decision-making for governments, reduce financial leakages and create shared outcomes, we will continue to disappoint the people that need support the most.