Strengthening Extractive Industry Revenue and Contract Transparency of International Financial Institutions (IFI's) in the Caucasus and Central Asia

During the last few years, a major focus of RWI's collaboration with Bank Information Center (BIC) has been the effort to make revenues and contracts related to IFI projects more transparent. The first phase of this work concentrated on advocacy of strong IFI commitments on transparency. Partially as a result of pressures from civil society, IFIs introduced significant changes in policy, such as revisions related to the World Bank's Extractive Industry Review and the EBRD's new Energy Policy. The second phase of BIC's work focused on monitoring implementation of the commitments that the IFIs had made. The commitments included greater transparency requirements for IFI individual projects and efforts by IFIs to build capacity and encourage transparency at the country level.

This project is part of ongoing work by Revenue Watch and BIC to influence current IFI policies and to monitor the commitments made thus far. Its primary objective is to strengthen the capacity of civil society organizations in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Russia, working with existing RWI partners in-country, to better understand and influence the activities of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in order to improve revenue and contract transparency in the extractive industries. The project is aimed at reducing important gaps in current IFI disclosure policies and exposing the weaknesses in implementation of recent IFI commitments on transparency in extractive industry projects.