The Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency is a network that connects important international actors with other international initiatives, together with champion governments and civil society organizations, to significantly advance fiscal transparency. While facilitating dialogue and cooperation in an action network, GIFT strengthens norms and creates incentives for countries to engage in a dialogue with civil society organizations, to improve transparency and engagement on the source and use of public resources. The multi-stakeholder action network facilitates peer-learning and technical assistance and produces meaningful evidence about the benefits of fiscal openness.
In this framework, a major condition for GIFT’s impact is communication, exchanges and dialogue between its members. That is why we are very happy to introduce the GIFT’s Community of Practice. A desired outcome of many of our activities is an on-going dialogue with stakeholders. One way to encourage such continuity is through forming a Community of Practice network in the new GIFT website, where learning and sharing can continue remotely with regional and international peers.
The Community of Practice will be a communications mechanism for supporting training, online seminars, virtual meetings, online discussion, webinars to share good practices, online training courses, discussions, blogs, and other community communications. While one-way portals of information dissemination have value, the Community of Practice network GIFT envisions is a living and active online environment for global participants to share, probe, and learn from each other.
This will facilitate to extend the learning experience of civil society organizations and ministries of finances representatives that participate in workshop in the Fiscal Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership. GIFT has organized four of those workshops where one of the challenges has been the continuation of the exchanges and the dialogues between participants. The community of practices seeks to prolong these conversations for the benefit of the stakeholders.
GIFT is the sum of all the stakeholders, stewards and partners that collaborate through the network. From this perspective, GIFT is an enabler and facilitator of peer-to-peer learning, building bridges and facilitating the exchanges between government practitioners while adding the unique approach of the multi-stakeholder action network, particularly the dialogue with budget civil society organizations and the technical perspective of international organizations. El Salvador is improving its transparency portal with the help of Brazil’s experience; and Paraguay will learn about participation models from Mexico’s recent experience. From this perspective, the Community of Practice sets a platform to further facilitate these exchanges.
Be part of our Community of Practice. This new tool of GIFT will become a strategic component of our communication with you and other important partners like you, as well as a contribution to peer assistance. We will devote significant efforts to help all our partners to get acquainted with and use this tool.
JPGA