News
22 February 2007
Secretary of State launches £100m Governance & Transparency Fund
Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, launched the criteria for the £100m Governance and Transparency Fund (GTF) before an audience of around 50 representatives from civil society organisations, media groups, trade unions and others.
Inviting organisations to begin working on concept papers, the Secretary of State spoke about how the recent White Paper put good governance at the heart of our approach to international development. He thanked the audience for their contribution to the consultation process, commenting how the views they had expressed were used to shape the final version of the criteria. He emphasised:
“Good governance is about people and governments working together – it’s about governments being capable of doing the things that their people want; governments being accountable to their people for what they do, and governments responding to what their people want.
I hope this Fund, along with all the other work we do to support countries improve governance and strengthen democratic processes, will contribute to this because the best way to end poverty is for developing countries to do it themselves – after all that’s how we did it here”
White Paper Commitment
In the recent White Paper we made a commitment to 'Set up a new £100 million Governance and Transparency Fund to strengthen civil society and the media to help citizens hold their governments to account'.
In September of last year we produced draft criteria for the Fund and launched a full public consultation to which we received responses from a large number of organisations, not only from the UK but also from mainland Europe, North America and Africa. The feedback received was used to reshape and produce agreed final criteria and it is these which were launched on Monday.
Who and what will the GTF support?
The GTF will award grants of between £750,000 and £5 million over between 3 and 5 years to a wide range of organisations, across the globe and not just those based in the UK, including:
- Media groups campaigning for free speech;
- Women’s groups demanding greater rights for women in public life;
- Faith groups fighting for their right to practice their religion peacefully;
- Trade Unions championing decent pay and working conditions;
- Pro-Democracy groups who seek to strengthen the Parliamentary process; and
- NGOs.
Further information on the Governance and Transparency Fund and other funding available from DFID can be found on our funding pages
