Regional marathon for promoting engagement of CSOs, private sectors and citizens for integrity, transparency, and anti-corruption initiatives

Independent Research Institute of Mongolia (IRIM) and Innovation for Change Central Asia (I4C CA) implemented the ‘Virtual Marathon’ project. This project supported the concept development of innovative solutions to contribute to the increased transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption initiatives and prototyping and testing their solution for effectiveness and impact with the potential for a further scale-up and sustainable operation.
The Virtual Marathon project had three main objectives: 

• mobilize creative and innovative social movement and/ or campaign; 
• build capacity of practitioners in the area of accountability and transparency and help to enlarge their networks; 
• to provide information and expand knowledge of citizens through transparency and anti-corruption initiatives.

During the project implementation following activities have been implemented:

1. Preparation and Situation Analysis: The project team examined all the country-specific issues related to human development, political, social, and economic issues, human rights, and communication and media situations under the situation analysis report.
2. Training “Promoting Transparency and Accountability in Central Asia”: Conducted two days of online training for 32 participants from Mongolia, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Tajikistan prior to receiving project proposals from project teams, and professional experts were gave speeches on the topics, including Accountability and citizens engagement; Transparency and anti-corruption initiatives best practices in Mongolia; Global and regional trends and disruptive innovations; and Guide to create influential social media campaign. 
3. Call for Proposal and Selection Process: Developed a Call for a proposal based on an updated project framework and situation analysis to receive project proposals from interested teams of the target countries.
4. Project Implementation: The six selected teams completed their propose projects in their home countries for a total of 5 weeks.
5. Final Wrap-Up workshop and Best implementers: A total of 21 participants participated in the final workshop. Based on selection committee members’ final integrated score, the following Best Implementers were selected: 
   1. Tajikistan - Branch of the NGO "Office of Civil Liberties"
   2. Kyrgyzstan - Content Media NGO
   3. Tajikistan - Nuri Irfon NGO

Project implemented locations:

• Afghanistan
• Kazakhstan
• Kyrgyzstan
• Mongolia
• Tajikistan