Grant to The One Campaign Follows the Money

Omidyar Network is pleased to announce a three-year grant of up to $3m to The ONE Campaign to build the policy, advocacy and campaigning infrastructure for a global campaign on transparency and accountability. This three-year grant will support the campaign to “Follow the Money”, so that citizens can access information on where public money comes from, how it is spent and what the outcomes are.

The campaign aims to deliver open government and open data policy goals across six major sub-sectors (extractive industries transparency, beneficial ownership of companies and trusts, tax, foreign aid, budget and contract transparency) working with a global “follow the money” network which aims to ensure campaigning and advocacy on transparency and accountability is grounded in evidence and robust technical standards. Here ONE will work with partner organisations such as Open Knowledge, Global Integrity and the Transparency & Accountability Initiative.

The ONE Campaign’s mission to help eradicate extreme poverty and suffering is reliant on change, transparency and results in a broad range of sectors and initiatives. This is why we are supporting ONE to promote transparency across several sectors and to help join up the dots so that gains in one sector can support action in another.

ONE’s campaigners have set themselves ambitious goals for greater transparency and open data in a set of connected issue areas:

• In the extractives industries, to apply open and interoperable data standards to the data resulting from ground-breaking disclosure legislation in the EU, US and elsewhere;
• to persuade governments to be more open with their budgets;
• in tax transparency, to seek high-level support for automatic tax exchange agreements;
• in international aid, to support more and better data through the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)
• in public contracting, supporting the goals of the Open Contracting Partnership
• and targeting the thorny issue of beneficial ownership – i.e. identifying the real owners of companies and trusts.

Central to delivering those goals will be collaboration with expert groups in their fields – the International Budget Partnership, Global Financial Integrity and Publish What You Fund and many more – and of course governments and international organisations.

ONE’s campaigning has had a big impact in the open government sector over the past few years. We look forward to seeing ONE roll out more successful collaborative campaigns in the coming years.