Towards Lima: Making the Standard more meaningful
Towards Lima: Making the Standard more meaningful
The international EITI Board met on 21-22 October in Berne, Switzerland.
On the eve of the Board meeting, a group of experts and stakeholders from the commodity trade, government and civil society, met to discuss how to improve governance and transparency of the commodity trade. The meeting focused in particular on how the EITI platform can be helpful for improving disclosure and building dialogue in the oil trading sector.
On Monday a workshop was held on the accessibility and use of EITI data. Whilst EITI reports have disclosed over USD 1.6 trillion of payments from almost 40 countries around the world as well as provided insights in to the governance and management of many formerly opaque processes, the data is often locked away in hardcopy reports or pdf files. The workshop built on experiences in EITI countries and consultations about how accessibility and utility of these data can be built into EITI processes right from the design, the collection, through to the production and publication.
The Board meeting itself discussed issues such as how to make the existing EITI quality assurance system – ‘Validation’ – best fit the Standard that was revised in 2013; how to encourage countries to embed disclosure better into their systems rather than through a parallel EITI process; and how the EITI can govern itself better. Implicit in all of this were the preparations for the EITI Global Conference in Lima in February.
The Board also welcomed Malawi as the 49th EITI implementing country.
Blogs on the discussions from Berne are available at eiti.org/blog:
- Day 1: Preparing positions in Berne - Constituency meetings and a discussion on transparency in commodity trading take place before 30th Board meeting.
Day 2: Validating the Standard - Tough negotiations on improving the EITI’s quality assurance mechanism on the first day of the Berne Board meeting.
- Day 3: All eyes on next steps - The Board discussed the way forward on the final day of the Berne meeting.
(Updated: 26.10.15)