Asia – Page 5 – Step Up Consulting

May 15, 2014June 14, 2014 mikocanares Asia, Governance, Open Data, Research Projects

Step Up is Represented in OGP Bali Conference

Michael Canares, managing consultant of Step Up consulting is one of the representatives in the recent conference on Open Government Partnership held in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on May 6-7 2014. The theme of the conference was “Unlocking Innovative Openness: Impetus to Greater Citizen Engagement“. The two-day event was opened with the plenary address of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in front of more than 500 delegates from across Asia-Pacific and the world.

Mr. Canares is one of the 30 Filipinos from government, academia, media, and civil society, who were invited to attend the high-level conference. The conference discussed on the innovations, opportunities, limitations, and challenges of open government in the region.

Mr. Canares was the self-appointed rapporteur of the Open Data Research Network, a network of researchers on open data where Step Up Consulting is a member. During the course of the conference, he wrote two blog posts that were featured in the Open Government Partnership and cited in several articles on open governance and transparency.

The links to the posts on the Open Government Partnership website can be found here. These posts originally appeared in the Open Data Research Network website.

Day 1 Summary

Day 2 Summary

May 10, 2014June 10, 2014 mikocanares Asia, Capacity Building, Consulting Services, Facilitation, Local economic development, Monitoring and Evaluation, Non-Government Organizations

Step Up Consulting Assists EU/KNH EIPID Project

IKFI planning — Participants during the EIPID Sustainability Planning Workshop

Step Up Consulting Services was contracted by the Ilog Kinderhome Foundation, a partner of Kindernothilfe (Germany) in implementing an EU-funded “Empowering Indigenous Peoples for Inclusive Development” Project (EIPID Project), to conduct its sustainability planning workshop. The project ends this year and thus the need to craft a hand-over strategy to the different EIPID partners. The project is implemented in the province of Antique, more particularly the towns of Lauan, Valderrama, Tobias Fornier, Anini-y, and Hamtic.

The goal of the project is to empower the Iraynon-Bukidnon and the Ati households and communities so that they can proactive engage in local development processes. To date, the organization was able to assist more 800 IP households through the self-help approach – where they save, engage in business, and undertake social/community action activities. It resulted to positive changes more particularly to mothers and their children in terms of capacity to care and participate in local governance processes, and in terms of education and health, respectively.

The Sustainability Planning Workshop was held in Iloilo Business Hotel last 24-25 April, 2014. It was attended by the members of the Board of Directors of Ilog Kinderhome Foundation, KNH representative in the Philippines, provincial officials of the Province of Antique, representatives from national government agencies as TESDA, DILG, and NCIP. Step Up Consulting planned and facilitated the two-day event.

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014 mikocanares Anti-corruption, Asia, conference presentations, Corruption, Governance, Local Government Units, proxy indicators, Uncategorized

Step Up is Finalist at U4 Proxy Competition

Step Up Consulting Services is one of the five finalists at the U4 Proxy Competition launched by the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Center based in Bergen, Norway. Mr. Michael Canares, Managing Consultant of the firm, presented his idea in front of scholars, aid agency representatives, and students, of how corruption at the local level can be measured using locally-generated tax and fees as a proxy indicator.

U4 is one of the leading think tanks focusing in anti-corruption. It concentrates its efforts in assisting donor practitioners to address corruption challenges more effectively through their development support. The centre is operated by the Chr. Michelsen Institute – an independent centre for research on international development and policy – and is funded by AusAID (Australia), BTC (Belgium), CIDA (Canada), DFID (UK), GIZ (Germany), Norad (Norway), Sida (Sweden) and The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.

The proxy challenge competition was launched last year “to address the perennial problem of assessing whether anti-corruption efforts are successful. “The Proxy Challenge” calls for greater use of bespoke proxy indicators. To assemble a body of promising ideas, U4 selected 5 finalists coming from development practitioners, monitoring and evaluation professionals, and researchers and convened these researchers in Bergen to present their work.

The five finalists were (1)Integrity Action; (2) Bernard Gauthier (HEC Montréal), Frédéric Lesné (CERDI), Joël Cariolle (CERDI); (3) Mihály Fazekas (University of Cambridge and Corruption Research Centre); (4) Joël Cariolle (CERDI), Frédéric Lesné (CERDI), Elise S. Brezis; and Michael Canares (Step Up Consulting). Mihaly Fazekas was the winner of the competition.

Michael Canares said that having been selected as one of the five finalists was already an honour in itself. In his presentation, he thanked the panel for giving him the opportunity to present his idea. Mr. Canares is the only presenter and finalist coming from the global south.

January 13, 2014 mikocanares Asia, Capacity Building, Consulting Services, Facilitation, Monitoring and Evaluation, Non-Government Organizations, Results-based Management

Step Up Consulting Assists Ilog Kinderhome

IMG_00000516_hdr — IKFI Participants during the Annual Planning and Evaluation Workshop

Step Up Consulting assists its long-time client Ilog Kinderhome Foundation, Inc. (IKFI) in two engagements – in training its project staff in the use and conduct of Most Significant Change (MSC) as a monitoring and evaluation tool, and in facilitating the conduct of its Annual Evaluation and Planning Workshop.

The training on MSC was attended by project staff of the Empowering Indigenous Communities for Inclusive Development Project (EIPID). EIPID, funded by the European Union through Kindernothilfe, is implemented in the province of Antique in order to empower indigenous communities socially, economically, and politically. The workshop was held at the CICM Retreat House in Talisay, Negros Occidental in October 28-30, 2013.

It can be recalled that Step Up Consulting assisted KNH in the writing of the EIPID concept note and full proposal some five years ago and was also the evaluation and planning consultant in the early part of the project.

The Annual Planning and Evaluation Workshop, on the other hand, was held at Natures Village Resort Hotel in Talisay, Negros Occidental last 2-5 January 2014. The workshop covered the planning and evaluation of three projects of IKFI – EIPID, Child-Focused Community Development implemented in Kabankalan, and WIP Project implemented in Ilog, both in Negros Occidental.

January 6, 2014January 6, 2014 mikocanares Asia, Associates, Open Data, Research Projects, Uncategorized

Open Data Team Holds Analysis Workshop

The Open Data Team of Step Up Consulting held a data analysis workshop last 21-22 December 2013 at the Dao Diamond Hotel. The workshop aimed at synthesizing fieldwork results of two case studies of the research project “Opening the Gates: Will Open Data Initiatives Make Local Governments in the Philippines More Transparent?”. (For more details of the project, please see http://www.lguopendata.ph/.

The Open Data team composed of Jare Arawiran, Marilou Sale, Marijoe Narca, and Joseph de Guia discussed the findings of the fieldwork conducted in Bohol and South Cotabato and reflected on the answers to the research questions gathered from the two sites as well as from documents review. The research will still have to visit the third case study site (Bulacan) in the first quarter of 2014.

This research project is one of the 17 case studies across the globe and is part of the Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries (ODDC). This project aims to to establish practical and actionable knowledge about effective strategies for employing open data as means to achieve greater quality of openness in government, support citizens’ rights, and promote more inclusive development in developing countries.

The funding for this work has been provided through the World Wide Web Foundation ‘Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries’ research project, supported by grant 107075 from Canada’s International Development Research Centre (web.idrc.ca). Find out more at www.opendataresearch.org/emergingimpacts

September 29, 2013September 30, 2013 mikocanares Asia, Local Government Units, Open Data, Research Projects

Step Up Managing Consultant Attends India Meeting on Open Data

Michael Canares, with some of the participants in the India Meet. Dr. Michael Gurstein (middle, in green polo) is one of the mentors of the project.

Mr. Michael Canares, Managing Consultant of Step Up Consulting Services and Team Leader of the Open LGU Research Project was one of those invited to attend the Regional Project Meeting of the Emerging Impacts of Open Data project funded by IDRC through the World Wide Web Foundation. The meeting was held at the The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, India last 16-19 July 2013 and was attended by more than twenty people from within Asia, and from the UK and Canada. The meeting also coincided with the TERI workshop on Open Government Data and Resources.

The meeting introduced the research project to stakeholders in India. At the same time, the participants were also orientated to the state and condition of open government data in India. An afternoon project launch on 16th June was done with representatives from different sectors in India – government, civil society, business community, and IT professionals. India is one of the countries with a right to information act (RTI) that has since empowered citizens to demand from government data to explain, for example, its spending and investment decisions.

The meeting also provided an opportunity for the researchers to discuss different tools used in the study of open government data. Among those discussed in the forum were stakeholder’s mapping, surveys, follow-the-data, news analysis, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews. Mr. Canares, in one of the sessions, led the discussion on the use of stakeholders’ mapping to define how stakeholders (e.g. business, civil society, research institutions) interact with government, and use government data for their purposes. This workshop was attended by one of ODDC project mentors, Michael Gurstein.

Michael Gurstein is one of the leading thinkers in community informatics. Most of his work deals with how information and communications technology empowers and enables communities. In this meeting, Dr. Gurstein contributed significantly to the discussion most especially in unearthing underlying theories informing the methods and in refining analysis frames of the different research methods that the researchers would like to use.