 Hi, everyone. My name is Lucia Cirimela and I work at Transparency International UK. First of all, I wanted to thank my society for ensuring that Tic-Tac could go on virtually in these complicated times. And I know that it's hard to focus on anything else than what's going on at the moment, but let's give it a try. Yeah, I'm sorry. There's a problem with the audio. You've got quite a lot of feedback on the headset and the food. Can you hear me any better now? That's perfect. Thank you. Great. Okay, let's see. Does it work? Cool. So yeah, I'm here today to talk to you about our global pledge tracker and initiative that started over three years ago. We have found it to be very impactful and we have learned many lessons from it. So hopefully you'll find it interesting as well. So before I start with this, I thought I'd shared a little bit more about Transparency International UK and what we do. So we are one of over a hundred local organizations across the world trying to fight corruption in our own context. Our vision is a world free of corruption. And as you might have guessed, we are Transparency International's chapter in the UK. So my team's work is mainly about doing advocacy based on evidence on three strands of work. So my team is called the UK Anti-Corruption Program. And we work mainly on corruption within the country, the UK as a hub for corruption elsewhere, and the UK's role in promoting global standards to tackle corruption overseas. The part of doing advocacy based on robust evidence is really important. This means that our research teams spend a lot of time gathering data and facts. And as a result of that, our advocacy colleagues campaign based on the evidence that has been obtained. This has been really impactful and it's a common approach of the whole Transparency International movement. It creates more buy-in for change than simply shouting empty asks. So for example, very recently through forensic analysis of more than 400 corruption and money laundering cases, our colleagues identified nearly 600 UK businesses, institutions and individuals enabling corrupt people to obtain, move and defend their illicit gains. So this investigation included a few technological aspects. And though this presentation is not about the particular topic of actual service, the report that you're looking at, I thought I'd share a couple of these tech aspects to give you a flavor of the other ways in which we use tech at TI UK. So first of all, the cases are stored in a relational database. So they are able to quickly analyze the different aspects about them. And second, a lot of the actual analysis they did had tech elements. They found common features of companies involved in money laundering and the network analysis to see how many looked similar. Now going back to the pledge tracker, which is the objective of this discussion, the main event that prompted this initiative was the 2016 Anti-Corruption Summit. Their 41 governments made more than 600 commitments to tackle corruption. And many of these promises were particularly nearly ambitious and specific, but the problem was that they did not have a follow-up mechanism. So there was no way of knowing how or when these commitments would be implemented. And obviously, to avoid this being another conference where grand words are said, but no action is taken afterwards, we decided to step in and bridge that gap through the creation of a monitoring tool. So TI UK started this through the creation of our UK anti-corruption pledge tracker in September 2016, four months after the summit. This tool was presented at the 2018 Tech Tech event and it monitors 16 anti-corruption commitments made by the UK government at the summit, including many that have been completed, such as a public central register of company beneficial ownership or the development of an anti-corruption strategy for the country and others that we're still advocating for like the establishment of a register of foreign companies who own or buy property in the UK. So this screenshot is the overall page of our database. And as you can see, we categorize with different colors depending on the progress and include responsible departments and commitments on the developments. You can click on each commitment to read more about how progress has been done. So a year after in collaboration with the Transparency International chapters in seven countries, we developed trackers in Ghana, Kenya, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Mexico and Jordan. All of these are tailored to each country's context and have different features depending on what the organization's advocacy asks are. And on top of this, we established a global monitoring tool where commitments of 21 countries are currently being tracked with the help of the whole Transparency International movement. So this is the screenshot of our worldview feature. You can click on each country and see which commitments the country has done and the progress of those. So I'll proceed to explain how it works. So as I said, at the moment, 21 countries are being monitored through our chapter store partners and more than 170 commitments are being monitored. So every six months, each chapter or partner looks into the latest developments on a specific commitment. This means that they contact government authorities responsible for the implementation of the commitments and they perform research to understand how a promise has evolved. Currently, the tracker focuses on six main themes. One is as a recovery, such as drafting legislation for the return of stolen assets. Others are on beneficial ownership transparency, like the creation of public registers, which is very useful to crack down money laundering, as we have seen from the Panama or Paradise papers. Other commitments are on law enforcement, such as international cooperation on corruption cases, the data, public procurement, which is super important as procurement accounts for one third of government spending in OECD countries, and whistleblower and civil society space protection. As a result of their research and engagement with the government, they categorize the commitment depending on the level of progress. So it goes in a spectrum from overdue or dropped to ongoing and complete and passing through inactive no data or on the way. These categories have specific definitions, which can be found on the database. And so one important thing is that we only use publicly available evidence to back this information because we believe that governments should publish this information for all the citizens to have. And then the evidence is reviewed and peer reviewed and ultimately published on the website. So this is a screenshot of the homepage of the global anti-corruption pledge tracker. You also have the world view feature that I've shown before, and you can also explore the commitments by country. So why is it important? More than a research tool, our aim is for it to be an advocacy and accountability tool, which can raise awareness of what governments had pledged to do, incentivize governments to act, hold them to account for the promises, reward achievements, and increase transparency and civic engagement. So as I said, this tool is not a research tool. It does not compare across countries as there are many nuances in the language in which commitments were made and the different contexts that each country has. And it shows how ambitious, new, and concrete these pledges were at the moment that they were set. Some progress stats, 83% of the commitments made on beneficial ownership registers are currently in play. So that means that they are being implemented at the moment, ongoing or complete. For example, Indonesia legislated for a central register of beneficial owners of companies. 88% of the open contracting data standard commitments are in play as well, such as Nigeria's open contracting portal, which is now in line with these standards. 78% of commitments made on as a recovery guidelines or legislation are in play. So, for example, some countries such as the U.K., the U.S., Nigeria, Ukraine developed a global forum on asset recovery principles for accountable asset return. Other examples are Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, which are drafting asset recovery legislation at the moment. And 91% of commitments made on whistleblower protection are on the way, ongoing or complete. For example, the passing of a new whistleblower regime for the private sector in Australia last year. Now, moving into the more nuanced and interesting facts that we've learned away from very broad level stats that might not help us understand the importance of this. If we hadn't been looking, would anything have been done? So in many cases, when Transparency International chapters started reaching out to the government to let them know that they would monitor the commitments, the government's reactions were, have we actually committed to do this? This is particularly interesting because the pledges were made at a very high level in governments, but most of this should have been implemented across various government departments due to the diverse nature of the commitments, because they fall under very different agencies. So in countries such as Jordan, Spain or Kenya, they weren't even aware of these commitments. So talking to the government about this created a space for implementation that wasn't even thought of. Another example is in the UK, when we were testing a thumbs down feature to show that one of the commitments was not being implemented. We had a call from the UK government immediately saying, Hey, what's that all about? So very thing going on. Then second fact, pledge tracking as a starting point. One of the most useful outcomes of pledge tracking is that it has enabled conversations about implementation, including who would be the responsible entity, the timelines, the step of specific procedures for implementation that might not have happened without this initiative. So in Jordan, Rashid, which is the TI chapter there, supported the government to develop an action plan to complete the commitments, which included responsible departments due dates and steps for completion. When they first started advocating, the prime minister addressed all related entities asking them to nominate liaison officers to follow up and advocate for the implementation of the commitments with the Jordanian integrity and anti-corruption commission. And so the team of advocates on the ground realized that there was no knowledge of the commitments made at the summit among the majority of the government agencies. So Rashid carried out meetings with the Ministry of Finance of Justice, income tax and sales departments and others to advocate for this implementation. And all of these entities appointed individual representatives to deal with implementation. So for years since the summit, this means that it's never too late to start pledge tracking. Another example is in Sri Lanka. So beyond the action of pledge tracking, this initiative has catalyzed much more nuanced work across many countries. It is the starting point to ensure good implementation by supporting governments in the enactment of more technical and complex legislation. So for example, year Sri Lanka has been tracking a commitment on ending impunity. Even if this could be considered a very broad commitment, what they did was firstly understand what needed to be implemented. There is currently an Act Victims and Witnesses Protection Act in place that tries to protect victims and witnesses of crimes, but they saw that more could be done to foster implementation. So the first step was to make this Act more accessible to the public as it was quite complex. The organization simplified it and created trailingual pamphlets which increased awareness of citizens and also of over 500 police stations where they distributed their pamphlets. TI Sri Lanka also ran mobile clinics which enabled people affected by corruption to access legal advice directly from the agencies. And through this proactive work collaboration with the authority increased and now the organization has been given permission to train the police on the provisions of this Act to better know how to protect victims and witnesses. So fact number three, even if we're not comparing some governments feel the peer pressure. As I mentioned our objective is not to compare between countries but for some organizations this initiative has been very useful to create healthy competition. The idea that there is a global tracker where governments are particularly useful in Nigeria where the chapter has been very successful in advocating as the government is looking at their reputation internationally. Fact number four, linking relevant accountability initiatives with each other can generate mutually reinforcing processes. So for example again in Nigeria this lack the chapter there uses the pledge tracker to monitor commitments both from the summit and from the open government partnership national action plan. So also TI Australia mentioned that the pledge tracker had helped them to argue for the inclusion of beneficial ownership as a commitment in their government's OGP national action plan. So pledge monitoring has multiplied forces in the implementation of other transparency and accountability processes. So pledge tracking is more effective when tailored our partner in TI Sri Lanka knew the importance of embedding these commitments into their own domestic settings to create more buying. So one of the ways in which they did that is to have their own pledge tracker in the three main spoken languages in the country. And fact number six whilst we cannot attribute causality one of the emerging trends we have seen since 2016 is a relationship between the progress of a commitment and how ambitious the commitment is. This talks to the importance of advocating for stronger language in the commitments from the start before governments make their promises because it can end up changing the course of implementation. So some final thoughts. We believe that pledge tracking is an effective means to measure progress on commitment fulfillment. It has created an efficient basis for civil society to seek accountability and to also support in the development of better legislation and implementation. Another thought is that the act of seeking information on implementation can help to prompt governments to respond and to account for progress. Also it's effective as a starting point and as a tool when combined with sustained advocacy as we have seen from the examples. And finally these projects findings align with our organization's theory of change which mentions that progress on corruption issues demands that there be strong supports technical advice and pressure from civil society in country. So that's why in this context the advocacy grants have been a strong addition to the project. So thank you very much. I hope you found this interesting and I'm here to answer questions as well.