Building data and research bases for 18 Arab states from scratch:
In this session, Hamoud Almahmoud, in charge of setting up the Arab world’s first data and research center, shares his drive to collecting on-line/off-line records in 18 Arab countries where the right to access information is non-existent, except for Jordan, Tunisia and Yemen. He shows how the Amman-based Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), can help journalists benefit from a trove of registration records for Arab companies, profiles of investors and official gazettes, and court cases. He offers tips on how to search for data in the region where spelling the names of businessmen, investors and companies may differ from country to country.
Khadija Sharife will focus on the concept of Africa's Double Offshore, using the example of Nigeria's hidden deepwater economy, catalysing loss of revenue in multiple forms through the parallel fiscal regime. Nigeria's offshore is characterised by maritime and corporate secrecy, use of tax havens, imprecise and vague national and international legislation, facilitating opacity and leakage in form and flow. This project includes an academic report, investigative pieces, and a website (doubleoffshore.org), still being populated, that focuses primarily on rig ownership relocated to virtual political economies governed by secrecy.
Eva Constantaras will discuss challenges in accessing developing country data on opium eradication, arms trafficking, and public procurement. In Kenya, civil society groups are generating valuable data from parliamentary monitoring, extractive industry documents and budget analysis that have led to major investigations. Experiments in structured journalism in Central America are also mapping out power structures of organized crime.
