More than a third of Colombia’s exports come from the oil industry, directly linking performance in oil-related activities to the national economy. However, corruption risks threaten to disrupt growth within and beyond the sector. Addressing this challenge will require greater transparency in the oil industry as well as stronger governance—both of which could also contribute to mitigating environmental impacts from oil extraction and benefiting communities in oil-producing areas.

The Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption (LTRC) project, a joint initiative of the Brookings Institution and Results for Development, in collaboration with Colombian civil society organization, Crudo Transparente, and Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) have applied a corruption diagnostic tool in the extractives industry to the oil industry in the municipalities of Tauramena and Maní in Colombia’s department of Casanare. The tool provides a way to identify corruption risks with the highest probability of occurring and the greatest potential to cause damage, then consequently develops an action plan aimed at reducing those risks.

The study and the resulting action plan take a regional perspective that considers the needs of the country’s outer region, rather than solutions dictated from Bogotá. The inclusion of the regional perspective allows for a more comprehensive approach to addressing the risks of corruption in Colombia’s oil industry.

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To address these obstacles, we began Phase 2 of the FGI project seeking to strengthen our understanding of the barriers to Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) uptake and implementation among fiscal governance, human rights and social justice actors.

This learning brief presents our findings from this research, including:

• Challenges to MEL implementation and uptake identified by informants and the literature
• Strategies to address common MEL challenges
• Informant perspectives on how COVID-19 affected MEL in positive and negative ways

The post Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning Hurdles and Helpers: Learnings from the Fiscal Governance, Economic Justice & Social Justice Fields appeared first on Results for Development.

At Results for Development (R4D), Ms. Handigol is a senior program associate on the evaluation & adaptive learning team. She executes project management and collaboration with the Tanzania Ministry of Health to test innovative solutions to improve health provider diagnosis and prescription for childhood pneumonia. She also conducts qualitative research and coordination for programs funded by USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation focused on health systems strengthening, evidence uptake and resiliency-building in the face of civic space closures with partners across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia and Eastern Europe. 

Prior to joining R4D, Ms. Handigol served as Princeton in Asia Public Health Fellow based in Hồ Chí Minh, Việt Nam where she worked on HPV and cervical cancer prevention, education and access to testing. As a Fellow, Apoorva also served as a Senior Analyst with Tractus Asia, supporting global businesses on their market entry and investment strategy in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Previously, she conducted healthcare integration project management at El Camino Hospital, working on quality metric analysis to increase Medicare reimbursement for El Camino physicians. 

Ms. Handigol holds a BA in sociology & anthropology from Carleton College. She is a native English speaker and is conversational in French, Vietnamese, and Kannada. 

Additional Resources

• Translating Modeled Evidence for Decision Making – Webinar 

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The government has signaled its intention to formalize the sector, improve revenue collection, and increase the contribution of solid minerals to the country’s gross domestic product. But progress has been slow and uneven, complicated by a lack of geological information and limited government capacity. Residents consider the government’s efforts to be merely cosmetic.

The Leveraging Transparency and Reducing Corruption (LTRC) project is supporting investigative journalists in identifying implementation gaps and plausible solutions to concrete challenges within extractives.

The report concludes with recommendations for government, communities, and civil society groups.

The post Abandoned Mining Sites: A Danger to Communities Across Nigeria appeared first on Results for Development.

Ms. Bain started her career at the grassroots level working with several community organizations throughout Latin America using participatory approaches to support local communities in protecting children’s rights and improving opportunities for families living in urban poverty.

With more than 30 years of experience, Ms. Bain has spent time at the senior-level in multilateral organizations, including managing portfolios of programs from field offices. She formerly held positions as technical director of the Learning, Evidence and Advocacy Program (LEAP) in Nigeria (financed by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – FCDO), research associate at the Overseas Development Institute, country program manager in Ghana for the World Bank, senior governance specialist at the World Bank in Africa and Latin America, and political economy consultant with The Asia Foundation and the Natural Resources Governance Institute (NRGI), among others.

During her time at the World Bank, Ms. Bain authored several published reports on the role of civil society organizations and social capital in improving development outcomes, the politics of policy reform and systems change, and the organizational determinants and enabling factors to support innovation for results in international development bureaucracies.

Ms. Bain’s drive to serve communities in Latin America, Africa and Asia is furthered by her focus on how organizations can solve system-wide problems through adaptive approaches that allow locally-led teams to think and work politically to embed world class technical solutions at scale within complex local contexts. 

Ms. Bain received her MSc (with distinction) in social policy & planning in developing countries from the London School of Economics and political science and a BA in modern languages & political science from the University of Manchester.

Ms. Bain is fluent in Spanish and English.

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