Zainab Hawa Bangura of Sierra Leone is Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict at the level of Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations.

Prior to this appointment, Ms. Bangura was the Minister of Health and Sanitation for the Government of Sierra Leone, and brings to the position over 20 years of policy, diplomatic and practical experience in the field of governance, conflict resolution and reconciliation in Africa. She was previously the second female Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, including Chief Adviser and Spokesperson of the President on bilateral and international issues. Ms. Bangura has been instrumental in developing national programmes on affordable health, advocating for the elimination of genital mutilation, managing the country’s Peace Building Commission and contributing to the multilateral and bilateral relations with the international community. She is experienced in meeting with interlocutors in diverse situations, including rebel groups, and familiar in dealing with State and non-State actors relevant to issues of sexual violence while fighting corruption and impunity.

Ms. Bangura has on-the-ground experience with peacekeeping operations from within the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), where she was responsible for the management of the largest civilian component of the Mission, including promoting capacity-building of government institutions and community reconciliation. She is an experienced results-driven civil society, human and women’s rights campaigner and democracy activist, notably as Executive Director of the National Accountability Groups, Chair and Co-founder of the Movement for Progress Party of Sierra Leone, as well as Coordinator and Co-founder of the Campaign for Good Governance.

Ms. Bangura is a former fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute of London, possessing Diplomas in Insurance Management from the City University Business School of London and Nottingham University. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.

Abstract
I will discuss an ambitious project by the Program on Liberation Technology to fight corruption with mobile phones. The project is being designed with partners in four states of India on issues such as education, health and social protection for some of the most vulnerable communities in India.  The project has started at a time when technology for transparency and accountability projects have come under increasing scrutiny. For example, a series of papers have questioned if transparency has an impact in improving accountability, and thus have raised questions on the very premise of such projects.  Similarly, the Open Data movement succeeded in getting data in the public sphere but most datasets are languishing with no takers.  He will discuss what these studies mean for the project, and some insights from it on designing technologies for transparency and accountability.

Abstract:

What explains the decline of clientelism in advanced democracies? This paper examines the United States and Britain from 1880-1920, a period in which political parties shifted from clientelistic to programmatic competition. I theorize that business pressures incentivize parties to change clientelistic strategies. Using archival and quantitative evidence, I find that the rise of managerial capitalism, the establishment of national business organizations, and the increasing costs of clientelism to economic development led businesses to push for programmatic reforms.

Speaker Bio:

Didi Kuo is a fellow with the Project on American Democracy at CDDRL. Her research interests include clientelism, democracy, and corruption. Her book project investigates clientelism in historical and comparative perspective using archival resources and new measures of electoral fraud. She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University in 2013.

Abstract
To what extent can information and technology be used to eliminate government corruption? In this talk, I examine an ambitious "open governance" experiment by the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within a bureaucracy to reduce corruption. In this talk, I examine attempts of the state in achieving transparency through intra-state surveillance using technologies and by creating a hybrid state-civil society institution to involve beneficiaries to openly inspect formerly closed government records through a process of "social audits". While, acknowledging that endemic corruption that tends to happen in the local "last mile" of such schemes have reduced, I show how local bureaucrats and politicians also discovered ways to subvert these efforts of control. My work suggests that the future of such informational transparency government programs lies in recognizing that the move towards "openness" is more of a political project than a technological and bureaucratic one that needs wider participation from those it intends to benefit.

 Rajesh Veeraraghavan is a Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information. Prior to his doctoral work, he was an associate researcher at Microsoft Research, India, where his work focused on building appropriate technologies for agriculture. In his past, he worked as a software developer at Microsoft in the US for several years. He has volunteered for the non-profit Association for India's Development in the US for a decade. Veeraraghavan holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Clemson University, Master's degree in Economics from Cleveland State University, and Bachelor's degrees in Economics and Management from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, India.