This is an interview with Benoît Fontaine (Advisor with the King Baudouin Foundation) who is working on developing GuideStar in Belgium. He talks about:

* The civil society sector in Belgium
* The reason for GuideStar interest in Belgium
* The main partners for the initiative
* Where the data for GuideStar Belgium will come from

The latest GuideStar International Newsletter is now available (April 2009). In it you can find an update on GuideStar International, news from our partners and relevant articles about what is happening in the CSO sector.

'The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) is looking for an experienced editor to assist in the implementation of the ADBI publications program. Applicants must be nationals of an ADB member country and should already be residing in Japan with valid permission to work, if applicable.'

The objective of this paper is to examine the role of civil society in both promoting and securing access to information (ATI) legislation and assisting in its implementation. The focus of the paper is to understand the background to campaigns for access to information in five countries, Bulgaria, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In each, the paper seeks to understand the role that civil society played in conjunction with other social actors. The paper looks at the interactio more...

The 1st Quarterly GuideStar International Newsletter is now available. This gives an update on what has been happening with GuideStar in Europe, Korea, India, Japan, the UK and US and features an interview with the CEO of GuideStar Data services (the newly established Community Interest Company) which is owned by GSI. It also features a report of the GuideStar International Assembly in 2008 and a variety of related articles about the civil society sector.

GuideStar UK has produced a video which features views from a variety of stakeholders, such as local and international charitable organisations and grantmakers regarding the importance of information in the development of the sector. We would like to thank Dragonfly Productions, (previously Firefly Productions) for their generous support in the making of this film Have a look at the video.

The 3rd GuideStar Assembly entitled ‘From local to global: The importance of CSO information for citizen engagement’ was held at 2 Temple Place in London on the 2nd- 3rd December 2008. The Assembly gathered 90 people from 19 countries to discuss the ways in which information can empower civil society and decision-makers at all levels, to engage and surmount barriers that limit the civil society sector today. A report and presentations, are now available on the GSI website

The Report, titled Overcoming Inequality: Why
Governance Matters, identifies deep and persistent disparities based on income, gender, location, ethnicity and other markers for disadvantage as a major barrier to progress in education. Inequity in education is linked
to wider disparities in the distribution of power, wealth and opportunity. And it is perpetuated by policies that either tolerate or actively exacerbate an unfair distribution of life chances – policies that fuel the transmission more...

An estimated 3.5 billion mobile phones are now in use around the world—more people now have one than don’t.1 This remarkable revolution—widespread access to the most ubiquitous communication device in human history—has changed the way societies and communities organize themselves and do business.

The authors set out in this report to explore the ways in which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups deploy and use mobile technology in their work to help solve some of the more...

The practice of evidence based policy has gained increasing endorsement in recent years, so much so that it could now reasonably be argued that no policy decision is justified without a strong evidence base to substantiate it. Drawing on the findings of the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme at the Overseas Development Institute in London, this article will argue that a robust evidence base helps to underpin policy-decisions, both enriching the process and, perhaps more importa more...