Only 19 States Enlisted On Open Governance Partnership

Only 19 states of the federation including the FCT are currently enlisted in the Open Governance Partnership, (OGP), in Nigeria, out of which Kaduna, Plateau and the FCT are global members.

The enlisted states since Nigeria signed into OGP,  in July 2016, are Adamawa, Anambra, Bauchi, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Enugu, Gombe, Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi, Ondo, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba, Zamfara and FCT.

Rising from a three-day workshop organised by USAID in collaboration with State Accountability, Transparency And Effectiveness (STATE2STATE) Activity and OGP, for the development of OGP State Action Plan for Sokoto state, templates was designed and adopted for achievements in five thematic areas.

The thematic areas are Physical Transparency, Citizen’s Engagement, Service Delivery, Extractive Transparency and Access to Justice.

Civil Society specialist, Abayomi Akimbo, speaking on the overview of Open Governance Partnership in Nigeria and Nigerian states, Approach, Principle and Benefits, maintained that development and evaluation of OGP states plan is, to make governance work for everyone.

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Hajiya Aisha Ahmed, Gender Social Inclusion Specialist for USAID STATE2STATE, remarked that objectives of OGP is, to build capacity of states steering and technical members on the OGP principles and operations.

In the aspect of Physical Transparency, the consensus was that, the state government should enhance more openess in citizen’s participation in budget foundation, approval, implementation up to auditing stages. Government should also ensure more transparency in it revenue and expenditure.

To ensure citizen’s engagement, budget information should be made available to the citizens for effective monitoring and tracking, while Extractive Transparency will foster citizen’s participation and cordial relationship between the citizens and the extractive sector/industry in the state.

Citizens need to know their rights and ensure that their human rights are guaranteed towards justice for all as pointers to, Access to Justice while, the need to effectively monitor the implementation of service and deliveries by the government particularly, on the part of NGOs and CSOs through, digital and non-digital delivery performance platforms, will be the yardstick for assessing service delivery.