Open Government Support Program in Francophone Africa - #PAGOF

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) was inaugurated in September 2011 and is a multilateral initiative which today counts about 78 member countries, as well as NGOs and representatives of civil society. France joined it in April 2014.

It brings together, within the same international structure, governments and civil society around the same table and with the same power of initiative and decision-making.

At international level, the Partnership works to promote transparency in public action, through public data openness (access to information), increase public integrity and accountability (fight against corruption), promote citizen participation in the definition of public policies and rely on the use of new technologies to increase open data.

At national level, in each member country, it contributes to feeding into the dialogue between the State and civil society, thanks to the preparation of “National Action Plans”, which comprise a series of commitments and aim to advance transparency, integrity, citizen participation and the use of new technologies in public action. 

While it co-chaired the Open Government Partnership (from September 2016 to September 2017), France committed to support the transparency of public action at international level by showing its support to Francophone countries in the implementation of their action plans.

In this context, Expertise France, the French international technical cooperation agency, and CFI, the French media development agency, have implemented the first phase of this technical assistance project, which lasted 5 years and received a EUR 3.5m of financing from AFD (including EUR 2m for the component implemented by Expertise France, and EUR 1.5m for the component implemented by CFI). The project started in October 2017 and came to an end at the Ouagadougou regional seminar in June 2022.

It has supported Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Tunisia in improving transparency in public action and accountability. More specifically, the actions focused on the following objectives:

• Developing open data portals in the 3 countries
• Supporting budget transparency in Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso
• Improving transparency and open data at the national and local scales in Tunisia
• Promoting citizen participation in the 3 countries
• Building knowledge on open government in the 3 countries

Following on from the first phase of #PAGOF, a second project was launched on 30th May 2022, in order to pursue the assistance set up between 2017 and 2022.

Thanks to a EUR 6m financing from AFD, this new phase will last 3.5 years (42 months) and aims to support and assist administrations and civil society, including the media, in 4 Francophone member countries of OGP (Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia) in the achievement of their National Action Plan, in relation to open government. The objective is to comply with the OGP principles of transparency of public action and data access, the integrity of public action and public officials, citizen participation and the use of new technologies for openness and accountability. PAGOF2 also includes a regional component which aims to raise awareness and support the efforts of Francophone African countries in their transparency and OGP membership processes.

Each country of operation benefits from a strengthening of its open government culture. It includes capacity-building actions for medias and journalists (in Tunisia and Côte d’Ivoire); the organisation of an open government forum (in Tunisia) as well as communication and raising-awareness activities on open government (in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Morocco).

Each country also receives a tailored support to implement its national action plan:

• Tunisia: decentralisation and support to local open government and use of open data
• Côte d’Ivoire: financial transparency and fight against corruption
• Senegal: improving budget transparency, setting up a mandatory participatory budget at the local scale and improving the participation of women and young people into decision-making authorities
• Morocco: launching a national portal to provide distance learning to associations, developing and sharing a tool box to strengthen communication and citizen participation in local authorities, mobilising civil society and building capacities to improve the implementation of the environmental policy as well as citizen participation