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Bahrain launches anti-corruption campaign

Bahrain’s Anti-Corruption Directorate will carry out a National Anti-Corruption (Nazaha) 2014 Campaign from June 1 to June 10. The campaign is part of the strategy of the Interior Ministry to support community partnership to combat corruption. Among others, the campaign will highlight corruption crimes through newspaper articles, social media such as a Facebook page linked to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, and reports on corruption risks in the public and private sectors.

Read the story by Bahrain News Agency.

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UNODC co-organises 4th Commonwealth Anti-Corruption Regional Conference in Ghana

The Fourth Commonwealth Regional Conference for Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa opened in Accra, Ghana, on 28 May 2014. The conference is organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat, in collaboration with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), Ghana’s Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the Economic and Organised Crime Office.

The Conference theme is “Coordinating Anti-Corruption Agenda within the Commonwealth.” Participating are 17 Commonwealth African Countries, including Nigeria, Cameroun, Mozambique, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Botswana.

The five-day conference, which was opened by President John Dramani Mahama, seeks to give the Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies the unique opportunity to forge some common understanding of the tasks that lie ahead of them as anti-corruption institutions and to share invaluable experiences.

Read the story in Ghana News Agency.

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Guyana’s compliance with the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption and the UNCAC (Part 1)

Former Auditor General and President of Transparency Institute Guyana Inc, Anand Goolsarran, participated in a five-day conference of the International Consortium of Government Financial Management in Miami, Florida, 18 to 23 May 2014. He presented a paper on “Guyana’s compliance with the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption” to about 300 participants mainly from Africa and the Caribbean.
 
Read the first part of Mr Goolsarran’s paper in Stabroek News.

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New transparency rules key to trust in investor-state settlements says head of UNCITRAL Regional Center for Asia-Pacific

With free trade emerging as a global norm for growth, new U.N. rules on transparency in disputes between investors and host countries will play a key role in bolstering their relations while providing greater public access to arbitration procedures, said Joao Ribeiro, head of the UN Commission on International Trade Law’s (UNCITRAL) regional center for Asia and the Pacific, in an interview with The Korea Herald.

The upgraded arbitration rules of UNCITRAL took effect in April 2014 after years of preparations. They now guarantee public access to settlement proceedings, documents and hearings that were confidential in the past. “These rules on transparency introduce further transparency in good governance principle,” Ribeiro said.

Read the full interview in The Korea Herald.

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Nigeria: Unleashing ICT in Governance

21 May 2-14 — Delivering its key mandate of infrastructure development, inclusive development, local content and Information Technology, IT in government, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications Technology, (FMCT) since inception has been able to chart an increase in the contribution of IT sector to the national Gross Domestic Product, GDP, by unleashing ICT in governance.

To reinforce the commitment of President Goodluck Jonathan’s initiative to improve internal efficiency in government, the FMCT is promoting ICT in Government, by facilitating e-Government, which enhances transparency, efficiency, productivity and citizen engagement.

The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson in a detailed report, of the FMCT since it began operations in 2011, marshalled out road maps which have been created to help deliver core objectives.

According to the road maps, getting government online initiative was geared at ensuring that government deploys technology as a mechanism to transform the way it operates and enhances the effectiveness of service delivery for the benefit of its citizens.

Government calls centres:

According to Johnson, the FMCT is setting up Government Contact Centres, which would facilitate efficient response to citizen requests through a two-tier response approach.

The Contact Centre will be located in the six geopolitical zones of the country. The centre, she said, was planned to house robust databases as well as accommodate 150 operator seats.

MDA websites:

Before the creation of the FMCT, most MDAs did not have domain names. But in line with its mandate to improve the quality of public service delivery, all websites of Ministries across the federation under the administration of current CT Ministry have been migrated to a standard domain name at ‘.gov.ng’.

“To maintain the relevance and efficiency of these websites, the FMCT has issued web standards and guidelines that ensure uniformity across all MDA websites. The guidelines ensure quality of each website, its relevance and accuracy of information” the Minister said.

Email addresses for civil servants:

Looking forward with zeal to next year of achievements and delivering on its mandate, she informed that a corollary to the implementation of websites was the official email addresses to enhance service delivery and good governance within MDAs.

This development, according to her will also lead to accountability and transparency in official government correspondence.

FG service portal:

The FMCT, as part of its mandate, according to the Minister embarked on initiatives to deploy ICT to drive transparency and efficiency in governance and public service delivery.

This, she said has led to the implementation of two flagship projects, namely the Government Service Portal (GSP) and Government Contact Centre (GCC).

“Government Service Portal (GSP) provides a single window technology access by citizens and other stakeholders to government services being provided by various MDAs” she explained.

It is multi-featured and includes collaborative channels that deliver core content management capabilities.

It also creates single point of entry to Federal Government services, enhance accountability and improve the delivery and quality of public services through technology-enabled civic engagement. The portal transforms government processes to increase public administration efficiency, increase end-user productivity by integrating many different services or data access paths of MDAs, under a consistent presentation standard.

Part of primary objectives of GSP included to mainstream some of the government’s non-sensitive datasets on the portal.

The Phase One of GSP, according to her include automation of 10 government processes from the Federal Ministry of Education; Federal Ministry of Health; Federal Ministry of Agriculture;Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment and the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology.

Network operating centre/data centre

Designing websites, registering domain names and creating e-mail addresses for government, the Minister said were all front-end activities.

“Ensuring that they remain sustainable is the essence of the Government Data centre, which is the back end activity. This is expected to be completed and fully operational by December 2015. The Government Data centre will be a fully equipped, facility, in Abuja, that is staffed round the clock.

“It is being built with uncompromising standards for security, power supply and environmental controls. Itwill be designed to offer enterprise data hosting services with particular focus on connectivity, redundancy and resilience” she explained.

She further explained that there are additional data centres currently under development as part of the nationwide infrastructure roll out plan, adding that this will track citizen engagement in what services were being accessed mostly online and also host the data generated from online engagement.

“In line with promoting the ‘Whole of Government’ approach in the information age, we are also proud to note that the ‘1Gov.net initiative’ won first place in the UN Public Service Award for 2013 for its approach to providing safe and secure IT infrastructure for the delivery of e-government services.

The 1Gov.net is a shared service platform for raising public sector productivity and efficiency using technology.

“Galaxy Backbone’s 1GOV.net initiative came up for recognition because it represents a creative and exemplary solution that transformed government’s chaotic information technology landscape into a single, coordinated government network in the space of 5 years”, she explained.

Open data initiatives:

According to the Minister, the FMCT has commenced implementation of Open Data Initiative to support the government’s objective of driving innovation, investment and economic growth, by enabling access to government data and by bringing to life the FOI Act.

The initiative, she said is a consultative and inclusive process that would open up high value data sets from across government ministries to citizens, businesses and the rest of the world, for free access to information.

“The commencement of the process makes Nigeria the world’s first Federal Open Data initiative to simultaneously launch inclusive and continuing consultations with both government and non-government communities, to develop the country’s national Open Data implementationplan.

“The Nigeria Federal Open Data Initiative, supported by the World Bank and DFID, aims to highlight the potential efficiency, innovations and public value that can be achieved when government uses technology to open its data” she explained.

According to her, over 50 countries have launched federal level Open Data initiatives. “The impact on economic growth can be trans formative; an analysis by McKinsey indicates that Open Data generates more than $3 trillion of new economic value for the U.S. economy alone.

This story originally appeared in http://www.unpan.org/Regions/Africa/PublicAdministrationNews/tabid/113/mctl/ArticleView/ModuleID/1460/articleId/42024/Default.aspx.