The Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance: Useful sites

With this objective in mind, the institution aims at assisting African countries – individually and collectively - in their efforts to achieve sustainable economic development and social progress. Combating poverty is at the heart of the continent’s efforts to attain sustainable economic growth. To this end, the Bank seeks to stimulate and mobilize internal and external resources to promote investments as well as provide its regional member countries with technical and financial assistance.

The institution’s greatest assets are its human resources which come from a wide geographic area. The Bank is an equal opportunity employer and firmly believes that recruitment from a wide geographical and cultural spectrum enriches the institution with varied talents, experiences and skills that will enhance the quality of human resources management and ultimately the realization of the Bank’s mission of reducing poverty across the continent.

In accordance with its policy of decentralization aimed at taking its operations closer to its beneficiaries, the Bank has, over the past few years, established about 23 field and country offices across the continent.

IBP launched the Initiative with the Open Budget Survey—a comprehensive analysis and survey that evaluates whether governments give the public access to budget information and opportunities to participate in the budget process at the national level. The IBP works with civil society partners in 85 countries to collect the data for the Survey. The first Open Budget Survey was released in 2006 and will be conducted biennially.

To easily measure the overall commitment of the countries surveyed to transparency and to allow for comparisons among countries, IBP created the Open Budget Index (OBI) from the Survey. The OBI assigns a score to each country based on the information it makes available to the public throughout the budget process.

The budget is a government’s plan for how it is going to use the public’s resources to meet the public’s needs. Transparency means all of a country’s people can access information on how much is allocated to different types of spending, what revenues are collected, and how international donor assistance and other public resources are used. The IBP believes that open budgets are empowering; they allow people to be the judge of whether or not their government officials are good stewards of public funds.

While providing the public with comprehensive and timely information on the government's budget and financial activities and opportunities to participate in decision making can strengthen oversight and improve policy choices, keeping the process closed can have the opposite effect. Restricting access to information creates opportunities for governments to hide unpopular, wasteful, and corrupt spending, ultimately reducing the resources available to fight poverty.

Since a significant amount of poverty-reducing expenditures take place at the subnational level, the Initiative also has initiated a major new effort to support work on budget transparency and accountability at this level.

The Open Budget Initiative plans to collaborate with civil society organizations worldwide to undertake research and advocacy to raise public awareness of the connections between budget transparency and people’s daily lives to mobilize public support for reform.

STICERD is both a thriving research community within the London School of Economics and Political Science and a source of funding for a variety of School-wide initiatives. We currently hold a total of £3.3 million in grant funding in addition to the support received from the endowment.