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A Tool for Strengthening Oversight and Territorial Democratic Governance
in the fight against corruption. Given the existence of diverse
oversight mechanisms in Colombia, the IGA allows for each of these
to be leveraged in order to guarantee one single objective: optimal
administration of information by territorial entities. For this reason,
IGA depends on the information provided by secondary sources,
requiring close cooperation and understanding between the different
entities that provide the information and are responsible for oversight
and control. This way it is feasible to perform an exhaustive oversight
of local public administration that leads to improved public services
and as such, increased public trust in institutions.
The IGA presumes that to the extent that there is an improved fluidity
of information available to interested parties (citizens, civil servants,
oversight entities and public entities) will performbetter and democratic
governance quality will increase. For these reasons, it is necessary to
follow-up on the evolution of the IGA with impact indicators such as
the unsatisfied basic needs index, the quality of life index or indicators
on trust in institutions. With the end goal of measuring impact of the
latter, surveys from the National Statistics Administrative Department
will be fielded to civil servants and citizens.
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This will be done so as
to ensure the community has greater participation in decision-making,
and that their demands are responded to more effectively by the state.
Thanks to contributions from national and international experts,
the PGN has been able to confirm the importance of this exercise.
According to Daniel Kaufmann, worldwide expert in governance and
the fight against corruption:
“IGA is a good and interesting initiative; it demonstrates
a systemic focus that has as a primary objective the
mitigation of risks for corruption. In addition, it
improves open government and the control of corruption
is very important because it provides a world average of
300 percent in development dividend. In other words, if
there is a realistic improvement in participatory and open
government and in the control of corruption, in the long
