Voies Nouvelles, the Cameroon-based budget monitoring organization and a winner of the Global Integrity Impact Challenge in 2009, continues to push government reform, maintaining an interested public audience for their organizational activities.
When Voies Nouvelles submitted their proposal to the Impact Challenge, the judges were most impressed by the organization’s emphasis on government engagement as a key component to their budget monitoring work. Over the past year, we have kept up with the organization’s maintenance of important public relationships and have been impressed by Voies Nouvelles’ consistent merging of the often siloed NGO and public communities.
Keeping with this organizational approach, last month, Voies Nouvelles gathered impressive group of 84 stakeholders to discuss regional education delivery. Tomo Onésim Cyrille, the Executive Secretary of Voies Nouvelles broke down the participants for me, who included a representative from the Ministry of Education, other ministry delegates, village chiefs, civil society and anti-corruption groups, a World Bank representative and someone from the German international development organization, GTZ. In much the same model that Global Integrity uses for its Dialogue Workshops, Voies Nouvelles used the results of its monitoring exercise— a study of public investment in Lekie over the three year period from 2007-2009— as the entry point for discussions of next steps and potential reforms.
The attendee list alone is a testament that the tenacity of Voies Nouvelles has not gone unnoticed. Take a look at Voies Nouvelles’ newly designed website for more details on the January workshop and their other work.
And keep your eye on this space for the forthcoming announcement of Global Integrity’s second annual Impact Challenge!
— Norah Mallaney
