Promoting Development Through Transparency and Access to Information

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) has established a platform of advocacy and action around natural resource monitoring, with emphasis on the extractive industries, to tackle the bigger challenge of resource abuse and its connection to war economies in Southern Africa. The region straddles a significantly resource-rich geoformation that includes currently exploited and as-yet unexploited deposits of gold, diamonds, oil, uranium, and cobalt.

This CD-ROM resource pack (also available as an online resource) includes a collection of documents related to this issue.

The following documents are part of the resource:

OSISA Related Information:

• OSISA strategy on transparency and accountability (slides)
• OSISA strategy on transparency and accountability
• Justice Initiative: access to information
• Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR): openness and access to information
• OPENSPACE articles: resource extraction and transparency


Laws, Policies and Protocols:

• Declaration of principles on freedom of expression in Africa
• The Johannesburg principles on natural security, freedom of expression and access to information
• Southern African Development Community (SADC) protocol against corruption
• Publish What You Pay
• Measuring revenue transparency: company performance in the oil and gas industries
• Follow the money: a guide to monitoring budgets and oil gas revenues (Jim Schultz)
• The Rough guide to transparency and natural resource revenues
• Revenue transparency in the extractive industries (Heike Mainhardt-Gibbs)
• Unearth justice: counting the cost of gold (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development - CAFOD)
• Transparency begins at home: an assessment of United States revenue transparency and extractive industries transparency initiative requirements (OXFAM America)
• The Equator principles: a financial industry benchmark for determining, assessing and managing social and environmental risk in project financing
• Campaign activity brief toolkit


Global Witness:

• The Devastating story of oil and banking in Angola's privatised war: all the president's men
• Global Witness to the extractive industries transparency initiative
• Making it work: why the Kimberly process must do more to stop conflict diamonds
• Time for transparency: coming clean on oil, mining and gas revenues
• Same old story: a background study on natural resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• The Riddle of the sphinx: where has Congo's oil money gone?
• It's a gas: funny business in the Turkmen-Ukraine gas trade


NIZA: Fatal Attractions:

• Unearth justice: counting the cost of gold
• The State vs the people: governance, mining and the transitional regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo
• The effect of the Kimberly process on governance, corruption and internal conflict


Bretton Woods Project:

• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and capital flight: redesigning the international financial architecture (David Spencer)
• The Development Gateway: biased, unaccountable and overpriced
• The World Bank policy scorecard: the new conditionality (Jeff Powell)
• Kept in the dark: a briefing on parliamentary scrutiny of the IMF and World Bank
• How much trust should we put in the funds (Jeff Powell)
• Secretive World Bank tribunal confronts call to open up
• Civil society and Wolfowitz's World Bank: reform or rejection revisited (Patrick Bond)
• The European Investment Bank in the South: in whose interest?


Transparency International (TI):

• Corruption perceptions index 2005
• First TI global corruption barometer survey, developed with Gallup International
• Corruption and humanitarian aid
• Political finance regulations: bridging the enforcement gap
• Standards on political funding and favours

To order a copy of the CD-ROM from OSISA, please use contact details below.