OSIWA’s special initiatives offer opportunities for coordinating and consolidating its interventions across the sub-region through the establishment of functional initiatives. The foundation runs a governance monitoring program to track monthly developments across the eighteen countries.

Program
OSIWA’s Special Initiatives are interventions conceived as a rapid response to issues that require immediate follow-up including those that may fall outside the organization’s funding priorities, but are within its mission and objectives. Their major purpose is to increase need for effectiveness, accountability and transparency in project development and support; address the need for internally developed initiatives; monitor and evaluate projects to guide the interventions under the special initiatives program.

Overall Objectives
On the whole, the Special Initiatives unit seeks to:
Provide flexible responses to emerging socio-political developments in the sub-region
Develop and promote functional model projects
Create avenues for broader interventions for OSIWA through networking with other OSI foundations and partners
Create platforms for monitoring and evaluating OSIWA initiatives
Create a platform for advocacy on issues central to OSIWA’s vision.

The Special Initiatives OSIWA continues to support include:
West Africa Democracy Radio (WADR)
West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI)
West Africa Resource Watch (WARW)
West Africa Public Interest Litigation Centre (WAPILC)
Governance Monitoring in West Africa
Evaluation of OSIWA Work in the sub-region

A. West Africa Democracy Radio
The OSIWA Board of Trustees initiated the West Africa Democracy radio in 2003 to promote democratic values and the principle of openness in the Mano river union countries at the first instance, and eventually to the other West African countries. The radio has been an efficient tool for giving voice to disempowered local communities, as well as for fostering peace and reconciliation across the Mano River Union and progressively in other ECOWAS Member States. It is also a privileged medium for information, education, discussion and debate on broader development concerns and especially the challenges to the open society project in West Africa.

B. The West Africa Civil Society Institute
The West Africa Civil Society Institute seeks to build the capacity of Civil Society Organizations and empower them to participate in governance by engaging the public and private sectors in the design and delivery of strategic policies for West Africa.

C. West Africa Resource Watch
To further consolidate work on natural resource governance, OSIWA, working with partners, in 2007, set up the West Africa Resource Watch (WARW) as an institute to work strategically on the issues of transparency and accountability in the management of public resources in West Africa. The major activities of the initiative include research, training, advocacy and building the necessary support for civil society organizations to keep watch on equitable use of resource revenue and to support public and private institutions engaged with the EITI and budget processes.

D. West Africa Public Litigation Centre
The Centre, set up in 2007, is designed to focus on three principal areas: support for human rights cases; advice and support on human rights cases before the ECOWAS Community Court; training in human rights and rule of law issues. The Centre, in providing training, mentoring and facilities, will thus promote the effective implementation of human rights in the region. The centre will also reinforce OSIWA’s current focal issues such as prisoner’s rights, constitutional reform and economic reform, transitional justice, legal protection of the rights of women, freedom of information, expression and the media.

E. OSIWA/CODESRIA Governance Monitoring Project
The Governance Monitoring Project seeks to monitor governance in OSIWA’S 18 program countries across West Africa and use the findings to feed into OSIWA’s program strategy. The politics of succession in West Africa is one of the major areas that the project addressed in 2007. OSIWA is also working to promote synergy between this joint governance monitoring project with CODESRIA and the OSI Africa-wide governance monitoring program called AFRIMAP.

F. Evaluation of OSIWA Projects
The Evaluation Project has an overall objective to assess the extent to which OSIWA, as an institution, has been able in general to realize its mission/objectives, as well as, the more specific goals built into particular programs, through the grants which it makes yearly. It also assesses OSIWA’s partners, with emphasis on their capacity to realize their own institutional objectives and programmatic goals.

Ressources

Governance in West Africa – A Survey of Trends in 2006; A Synthesis Report. Prepared by Adebayo Olokushi
The history of the West African sub-region’s engagement with issues of governance is a long one that can be traced far back in time to the earliest experiments with the constitution of political communities in the area. In the context of those experiments, which entailed nation- and state-building projects, historians have directly or indirectly pointed to the many challenges that preoccupied the political communities that were in the making in the area long before the arrival of the first European and the onset of colonial rule. This summary report looks at governance trends in West Africa from the pre-colonial era to the contemporary context.

Dissemination Workshop on Evaluation of OSIWA Projects in Four West African Countries
OSIWA commenced program work in 2001, but this mainly involved broad grant giving to address issues of open society in its 18 program countries in West and Central Africa. By 2002, it had developed a comprehensive strategy for program interventions, with a concentration in four countries, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone. To effectively assess its achievements and the impact of its activities, OSIWA commissioned an independent assessment of its program interventions in these four countries for the initial three year period 2002-2004). A total of 71 grants implemented by 67 grantees were assessed. This publication summarizes the report of the meeting that brought OSIWA partners to review and analyze the report.

WAPILC Quarterly : Journal of the West Africa Public Interest Litigation Centre
Welcome to the maiden edition of WAPILC Quarterly, the journal of the West Africa Public Interest Litigation Centre! WAPILC Quarterly is part of the research and publications mandate of WAPILC and seeks to collate cutting edge ideas and expositions on Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the West Africa sub-region. This maiden edition of the Quarterly will briefly discuss how WAPILC came to be, what it is meant to achieve and how exactly it will go about achieving its aims and objectives.