OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
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About Tr-Ac-Net The Transparency and Accountability Network Overview Vision The Tr-Ac-Net vision is that power of knowledge should help the world use its resources and its technological capacity in ways that are equitable and do not impose on people's rights. There are enough people who want this, and there are the technical capabilities to make it happen. Mission The Tr-Ac-Net mission is to facilitate improvement in the performance of relief and development by focus on the effectiveness of the use of funds, the use of resources to achieve community level progress and the use of technology to make management information for relief and development effective and universal Who make up Tr-Ac-Net Tr-Ac-Net is a network of professional individuals and organizations committed to success in development. The goal is action more than advocacy, and a belief that good information can be a driver of change and improved decision making and operational performance. The organization has been slowly emerging over a period of several years and in 2005 has been establishing programs to turn ideas into practice. The professional network of Tr-Ac-Net is international with active members in North America, Europe, Africa, South Asia, Latin America Who funds Tr-Ac-Net? Tr-Ac-Net has been funded by family and friends. Up to now the network and its professional tools have been developed through voluntary contribution of time and effort. Now the program has grown, new arrangements for financial and volunteer have been made. Tr-Ac-Net is cooperating with Ecologia Virtual Foundation (EVF) to expand the funding and support available to Tr-Ac-Net. Under this cooperation, EVF serves as a fiscal agent for Tr-Ac-Net in the USA and donations to EVF earmarked for Tr-Ac-Net are tax deductable. Transparency and Accountability People know very little about economic fund flows, and where the money is going. There is now a lot of dialog about transparency and accountability (T&A) and it is good that T&A is now on the relief and development agenda. But the underlying changes needed to have better decision making and more relief and development performance have hardly started. Tr-Ac-Net has the goal of making T&A an effective integral part of the relief and development process so that donors and beneficiaries are well served. Management Information The Tr-Ac-Net premise is that management information is central to good decision making for relief and development and the basis for socio-economic progress. Tr-Ac-Net wants to encourage very good accounting and management information and wants to change the mindset that more information is needed for better decisions. It is more of the right information and less of everything else. Community Centric Sustainable Development (CCSD) Tr-Ac-Net puts the community as the central focus of relief and development. Performance is measured in the community, and aggregates development from the community level. Communities in the 'south' have a lot of knowledge, but have not made a lot of progress during the past several decades. Tr-Ac-Net has a philosopy and structure that makes CCSD an efficient way to utilize resources for relief and development progress. Organizational Performance Tr-Ac-Net recognises some of the transparency and accountability issues are difficult for organizations and provides help in ways that respect the integrity or the organizational entity while also satisfying the need for better sharing of information. Tr-Ac-Net has an approach to Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) that makes it more effective and less costly than traditional M&E. The Tr-Ac-Net approach uses analytical methods to give early warning about performance and active feedback to improve activities. Resource Flow Transparency Tr-Ac-Net answers the question of what happens to funds that are disbursed for relief and development in all its forms. To the extent that the answer is that nobody knows, the information can be used to make decisions about allocation of scarce resources. Database An Internet accessible database of key information about development is being implemented. It was started in its first phase at the end of 2003. The goal is to put all the information that is needed to understand development performance into an 'open access' system. The database content is designed to improve decision making, to help assess development performance and to make independent reliable management information for development easily available. The database is Internet accessible. Wiki Database In its first phase the implementation was done using an open access Wiki. The ongoing development of the database is being phased to add functionality as the content matures. The database embraces the concept of open access. Everyone is welcome to use and contribute to the common pool of information. Information is only of management value when it is reliable. The content of the database is subject to validation by Tr-Ac-Net members. Dialog about relief and development issues Sharing information that is already known is better than ignoring existing data and repeating mistakes. International socio-economic development is complex and there are thousands of issues. The database is host to a dialog about issues and ways in which problems can be addressed and solutions implemented. Community information Community information is the foundation for metrics about relief and development. There is very little data about community performance that is easily accessible, yet it is community that has the most impact on an individual and a family's quality of life. Certainly the ORDA community has done studies and community development, but the associated metrics have never been established. Activities In any community, there are a range of activities that go on all the time simply to sustain life and provide food, water, clothes and shelter for the family. In addition there are other activities that can be implemented to improve the quality of life and provide durable benefit for the community. Tr-Ac-Net aims to help bring critical activity metrics into consideration as part of management information about relief and development, and a way of managing relief and development resources. Organizations Organizations have a set of metrics that are defined for reporting to the oversight authorities, and other metrics that are used internally to measure organizational performance. Broadly speaking, there is little measurement of the organizations use of resources and the related impact on relief and development performance. Tr-Ac-Net aims to help link the community level performance, with the activities and the organizations in a comprehensive systemic analysis framework. Resource Mobilization Tr-Ac-Net is organized so that there is much more reliable information being compiled so that it is easily accessible about relief and development resource flows and the actual use of the resource.
Peter Burgess
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