In February, 15 members of civil society from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Mongolia convened in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the first meeting of the Eurasia Regional Extractive Industries Knowledge Hub. The hub is part of Revenue Watch's strategy to provide civil society, government and media with the basic knowledge, tools and skills to take an active role in the oversight of the oil, gas and mining industries.
In Baku, participants learned about the "value chain," an outline of the stages of managing a natural resource, as well as contract analysis, revenue management and budget advocacy. Ingilab Ahmadov, director of the Eurasia hub in Baku, spoke with Revenue Watch about the training program.
What was the most important thing participants learned at the hub?
We wanted to give people information on the approach taken by Revenue Watch and the hub—the value chain approach. Many of the participants have experience with different components in the value chain. Some are familiar with contracting, some with EITI, some with budgeting. But none of them had the whole picture. When you see that the various parts of the value chain are interrelated and interdependent, then you perceive how one of these components can impact the others, and how improvements in one part of a long chain from discovery of natural resources to their development and use depends on the improvement of the other one.
For this, we had instructors from the international, regional and local levels. We had experts from Revenue Watch speaking at the international level. This was complemented by people sharing experience from the regional level. And then we had the local trainers from Azerbaijan who had very specific knowledge about oil contracts, social projects and supply chain issues in terms of oil revenues coming into the country.
By the end of the training, we selected a "star group" of participants who were more advanced and experienced, to take part in a second workshop later this year.
What sorts of transparency and extractive issues are most important in Eurasia?
In Central Asia and the Caucuses, we have different countries with different backgrounds. Of the four countries represented at the hub training, we have two that are mostly mining countries, Mongolia and the Kyrgyz Republic; and two, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, that focus more on oil and gas and revenue management.
I think we have to learn carefully from what each hub teaches: there are differences for each region. I think that in Africa, it's most important to focus on contracts. In Peru, trainings focus on expenditures, budget changes, public finances and cash flow.
In our case, we have to take into account our reality and our own demands. We found that revenue management is most important for us. Central Asia is a special region for transparency implementation. We have a lot of experience with transparency in this region, dating back to 2002, when we had the Caspian Revenue Watch program.
After ten years of advocacy, nations in Central Asia and the Caucuses have a strong record of implementing transparency measures. There is money coming into these countries, but problems remain in managing budgeting, spending and saving policies, and also in avoiding corruption.
Is there still active government repression of transparency advocacy?
Yes, particularly in Azerbaijan it's a problem. We have had strong achievements in EITI issues and we have a very effective State Oil Fund in Azerbaijan, which has made sound management decisions. However, the decision-making in terms of public finance management is still weak and inefficient. We see that government needs more active and open dialogue with civil society. Government should learn to accept criticism from civil society experts. In our trainings, we argue that if civil society has a high level of knowledge, then its recommendations can be useful to government in its daily decision-making.
What is the hub working on next?
We are going to conduct our next training on "EITI Essentials" from 28-30 May for representatives from new countries in our region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Georgia. It's a challenge for us to cover all this ground with these various countries, but it's our first year and we're building a very strong and attractive knowledge hub that will be highly valuable in our region.
LEARN MORE
