How to design a financial transparency strategy with a role-playing game

Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 6.59.19 PMFrom Transparency International‘s Financial Jargon Buster: Illicit Financial Flows.

Grateful thanks to Lucy Chambers for the thoughtful feedback provided on this post.

When we talk about financial transparency, numbers and data are understandably what first comes to mind. But are the platforms and portals collecting all that, the real starting point of our work? And how can we make sure that a particular technology which proved successful for a project whose execution we admire, would actually fit the ecosystem we’re working with?

Sounds like our starting point before kicking off any project should actually be much more lo-fi and hands-on: an offline analysis combining our learnings from the most remarkable case studies with a well-tailored and flexible understanding of the context we’re working with.

The interest in exploring a possible answer to this need got Jean Brice Tetka (Transparency International), Jay Bhalla (Open Institute) and me together in a breakout session during the recent Follow The Money workshop.

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On financial transparency and technology: notes from the Follow The Money workshop

Screen Shot 2015-01-28 at 3.15.47 PMFrom BudgIT’s Abacha’s Loot – Where are the returned funds?

Financial transparency can make governments, companies, politics and citizens accountable for their actions and help us fighting corruption in our societies. But how can we design frameworks to create and strengthen a transparent ecosystem? How can a multitude of actors with a diversity of professional backgrounds join their forces to learn from each other and build such frameworks?

These were just some of the burning questions fueling the conversations of the over 100 people getting ready to join the Follow The Money workshop taking place in Berlin on January 20-21. Organised by Transparency and Accountability Initiative, the workshop aimed at gathering policy campaigners, NGO leaders, programmers, researchers, funders and activists from all around the world to encourage connections and collaborations between them, as part of a collective action within the Follow The Money network.

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