By Rebecca Iwerks, RWI Program Officer, Training and Capacity Building
With bright sunlight shining on the gathered crowd, the mayor said, "I spent 25,242 soles for paving a street in the Cristo Nos Valga district."
Amid Sechura's anniversary celebration, Mayor Santos Valentin Querevalu Periche spent more than 45 minutes describing, in painstaking detail, each line of the local government's budget. Between the flag-raising ceremony and the boisterous parade, the entire town stopped to hear how their leaders were spending the income from their natural resources.
We came to Sechura along with colleagues from Indonesia to gather lessons on local transparency that we could bring to our work in other countries. Peru is often held out as an example for its advances in disclosure and participatory budgeting. Many NGOs laud Peru's web-based transparency portals that allow citizens to download meticulous information.
But this captivating public display may the most relevant example for our international work. Too often websites can be seen only by an elite few, and government reports tend to bury relevant details in pages of bureaucratic jargon.
With an open speech in the middle of a public event, however, this mayor gave every citizen, no matter their literacy or computer literacy, direct access to the workings of government. My Indonesian colleague leaned over and said, "I have never seen a speech like this in Indonesia." Seeing the speech live altered her perspective of transparency. As we left Sechura she bubbled with ideas for how to bring what she had seen to her work in the oil-rich Indonesian region of Cepu.
It is often difficult to articulate why site visits and face-to-face meetings are essential to our work. Seeing the mayor's vivid display of transparency and the way it galvanized my partners reminded me again why capacity-building work demands on the ground encounters.
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