The World Bank - Working for a world free of poverty

Syndicate content
A blog about Governance and Development for All

About us

Welcome

This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

Mexico

Empowering citizens to report crime via SMS... what else can they do with mobiles?

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-08-07 16:27

In a previous entry, I blogged about how mobile technology has been used to address some governance issues.  Crime denunciation was among the activities mentioned in which mobiles have empowered people by giving them a tool to report crime and violence outbreaks as they happen. 

Because a video is worth more than a thousand words, I'll share with you the case of CiviRep, an application that will allow citizens of Caracas to report crime via SMS.  Very similar to Ushahidi's platform, CiviRep aims at capturing on-the-go feedback from citizens to then map it with the help of Google Maps (see here Ushahidi's original example in Kenya).

 

CiviRep Team Video Spring 2009 from nextlab on Vimeo.

 

The Summit of the Americas: One Eye Wide Open, Another Shut

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2009-04-17 08:54

President Obama has just written an op-ed for over a dozen newspapers throughout the Americas, in the eve of the Fifth Summit of the Americas that is about to take place in Trinidad & Tobago.

This is significant.  I care deeply about the Latin America and the rest of hemisphere, and wanted to write about the upcoming Summit.  Yet until now what we had was a draft Summit "Declaration" which the country leaders and their (Foreign Ministerial?) teams had been belaboring for a couple of years.

That draft "Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain" is a travesty.  It is interminable and practically devoid of concreteness or substance.  It would be funny if we wouldn't be in the midst of a major economic crisis, one which is expected to hit South America particularly hard in the coming months.  Andres Oppenheimer has commented on that draft, labeling it as a joke.

 

Violence and crime in Mexico at the crossroads of misgovernance, poverty and inequality

Submitted by Alfredo on Mon, 2009-03-02 06:32

"Hello, son, are you Ok?  We just got a phone call, and someone told us that one of our sons/daughters was kidnapped. We wanted to be sure that you are fine."  You can imagine how scary was the movement that these parents went through after they picked up the phone and received the ugly and unexpected message.  As sad as it sounds, this situation is something that some families in Mexico have experienced.  Sometimes they are lucky to find out that their relatives are fine, and that everything was faked by someone looking for a profit by creating confusion among relatives.  In other unfortunate cases, the message is real and families have to go through very difficult experiences that may last several months and that not always have a good outcome.

It's not new that Mexico is having problems with violence and crime, coming either from drug-cartels or from organized mafias of kidnappers and car thieves, among others.  It's also true that the entire country is not a jungle and lawless area where nobody is safe.

Over the last decade and a half, most of the approaches to solve these issues have looked at the rule of law and law enforcement elements of the equation.  Better legislation that penalizes these criminal activities; well paid, trained, appropriately equipped and not corrupted police corps; military support to fight drug-cartels; better prison's system that functions as social rehabilitation centers and not as universities of crime... and the list goes on.  This is a good direction to follow.  However, I've always told my friends and colleagues that there are other elements in the equation that also matter a lot, namely, poverty reduction and inequality.

The most useless procedure: cutting red tape and corruption in Mexico

Submitted by Alfredo on Tue, 2008-11-11 16:15

It’s been recognized that civic engagement is fundamental to hold governments accountable and to improve the quality of governance.  This bottom-up approach was recently put into practice in Mexico, where the president decided to reward citizens who denounce the most absurd bureaucratic procedure that they have faced, and who propose the best solutions to cut red tape and bribery.

“The most useless procedure” is the name of the temporary campaign launched by the Mexican government to get citizens’ inputs about how it can improve its effectiveness to deliver public services and goods as well as to combat bribery. The citizen with the most original proposal at the federal level will win about $30,000, while more than $9,000 will be awarded to the best case and solution proposed at the state and local level of government.

So far, procedures related to health and social security , tax administration, education, civil registration and property rights protection are among the most denounce by citizens.

As innovative and attractive as this approach looks, in order to be effective it must be appropriately linked to major plans of modernization and reform of the public sector.  Moreover, even though more than 20 thousand citizens participated in this campaign, there needs to be more massive and permanent, rather than temporary, options to empower citizens in the fight against corruption and red tape.

IFAI and the agenda for transparency in Mexico

Submitted by Kaufmann on Sun, 2008-06-15 13:28
 
Mexico has become one of the best governmental examples of transparency and access to information. In 2002, the Congress enacted the Access to Public Information and Transparency Law that establishes that all the information held by the federal government is public. Since then, the Federal Institute for Access to Information (IFAI) has played a key role in carrying out this mandate of openness. It guarantees access to information law, protects citizens’ personal information held by the government, and investigates and resolves cases where public agencies refused to provide information. The IFAI has trained several federal staffers on how to comply with ATI law requirements.
 
The ATI law and IFAI implementation have produced 250,000 requests for information  between 2003 and 2007 – most of them done electronically. About 88 percent of the requests received a response, and IFAI addressed more than 12,000 appeals because the information was either denied or not produced in a satisfactory manner. Statistics do not include basic information that Mexicans  can get online like wages, organizational structure, hiring, or budget. Release of this data – mandatory for every federal office – does not require a formal request. But only 20 percent of the population has access to the Internet. Furthermore,  only 50 percent of citizens are aware of  the ATI law and the IFAI.
 

Mexico creates model for tackling corruption in tax administration

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2008-06-13 13:20
 Corruption in the administration of taxes presents several challenges to governments in developing countries. The main reasons are the complexity of the tax system, the level of discretion that tax officials enjoy when they interact with taxpayers, and the lack of capacity to monitor transactions and enforce tax laws. Governments must be readier to face the reality that a tax system undermined by corruption reduces revenue, which in turn degrades the quality of public services. This dynamic limits the potential for economic growth.