OGP in the News – Week of May 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 OGP’s press largely centered around the Anti-Corruption Summit in London – specifically with regard to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s participation in the event and UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s less than discreet comments about the African nation. Buhari used the summit as an occasion to announce that his country will join OGP, and in total, over 70 articles and pieces spoke directly of OGP in relation to the events in London. The majority of which came out of Nigeria – Africa’s most populous country – in such widely-read sources as The Punch, Naij.com, The Nation, and Vanguard.

OGP was also mentioned in a pair of pieces published by The Guardian on Nigeria in the run-up to the summit. The first spoke of OGP as a likely “centrepiece solution to government corruption” and the second concluded that “being part of an inclusive network should help Nigeria as it pushes for reform.” Furthermore, a Huffington Post article on the summit mentioned OGP as one of a number of “encouraging and successful citizen and civil society efforts at holding governments accountable in recent years.” And The Economist published a piece on the event which included the following:

Ensuring that countries keep to their latest burst of commitments will be quite a challenge. An initiative called the Open Government Partnership, to which 33 of the 40-odd participating countries have signed up, could help in this regard. Members will be expected to embed their summit commitments in their “national action plans”, which are subject to independent monitoring every two years—and NGOs have become rather good at kicking up a stink when these promises are not met.

In addition to London and Nigeria, last week’s OGP Africa Regional Meeting in Cape Town also continued to be a source of news. Pieces published by AllAfrica.com, the Council on Foreign Relations, Sierra Leone’s Awareness Times, and Foreign Affairs of New Zealand, among other sources, all spoke of outcomes from the event.

And in other parts of the world, The Huffington Post cited OGP in relation to Jordan in an article following the commemoration of Press Freedom Day; Chinese media wrote about OGP in an article on ‘Four features of the global open government data’; and Brazil’s ongoing political turmoil continued to bring OGP into the headlines.

And last but not least, as we’ve already seen, ‘fantastic corruption’ grabs everyone’s attention, so why not a ‘fantastic welcoming’?