Country: Chile
Website: fundacionmultitudes.org
Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram
Focal Point: Paulina Ibarra, Executive Director
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Mission and Vision
The mission of Fundación Multitudes is to bring citizens closer to public institutions, providing them with tools for effective advocacy and accountability, alongside increasing citizen participation and transparency in decision making processes; with three main pillars: we capacitate, we monitor, and we advocate to combat corruption, increase accountability and civil society participation in decision- making in the Latin American region.
Priority areas the organisation is working on
The priority areas of Fundación Multitudes are advocacy, transparency, and education. We focus on fighting anti-corruption and increasing civil society participation in decision-making with advocacy, transparency, and capacity-building through education. All of this, we do with two focus groups of vulnerable populations: women and the peoples in Chile. Most of our capacity building transparency and advocacy initiatives have a gender or a demographic perspective, as we focus on empowering vulnerable minorities in Chile to increase inclusivity and accountability.
Most important achievements in past two years
Fundación Multitudes was elected the Secretariat of the Civil Society Pillar of the Community of Democracies, and our Executive Director, Paulina Ibarra was elected Chairwoman of its International Steering Committee. Another achievement was our involvement in amending Chile’s 20,285 Transparency Law for a more robust legislative regulatory framework of accountability to prevent and fight institutional corruption. Another major achievement was our presentation in the Ethics Commission in the Constitutional Convention on the Lobbying Law as a mechanism of accountability and transparency and our Women’s Observatory Against Disinformation which aims to increase female participation and inclusion in decision-making.
Specific description of the CSO’s work on anti-corruption
Fundación Multitudes fights corruption with advocacy and monitoring tools. We employ two main intervention methods:
- research- based advocacy models to monitor and influence decision-making processes with data and,
- capacity-building programs to enable specific target groups of civil society (ie. women, original peoples, indigenous women, youth) to use an open government “toolbox/toolkit” to advocate for their civil rights and demand transparency and inclusion in decision-making. These two methods guided by tools allows us to empower civil society (specifically vulnerable populations) to prevent and fight corruption in decision-making.
Anti-corruption activities the organisation was involved in over the past two years
In the past two years, we’ve been involved in a series of activities related to anti-corruption efforts. In terms of activities, we often use two models: research-based advocacy via publications, studies and articles; and capacity building initiatives that focus on giving a certain focused group of civil society the tools to advocate for themselves and be better equipped to fight corruption and be included in decision-making processes.
To promote transparency, we developed a research-based advocacy project to increase the access to information during the COVID-19 pandemic in the municipality of Valparaíso, Chile. We also published an article on digital democracies to explore and raise awareness on the double-edged sword of the threat or tool that can harm or help democracy that make decision-making processes either more opaque or transparent. We developed studies and publications regarding the fight against corruption in municipal politics using the lobbying law. We also held and are holding activities to increase the inclusion of women in decision-making processes with Proyecto Mujeres, a series of webinars and small-scale capacity building initiatives to train women and indigenous women on open government tools and strategies to combat corruption at various levels of political participation (activism, congressional and municipal politics).
CSO’s work in relation to the UNCAC and its review mechanism
We currently do not do any work in relation to UNCAC and the UNCAC review mechanism in an official capacity. However, when evaluating the UNCAC review mechanism, we noticed that it is work that we are very familiar with. Fundación Multitudes is also the Secretariat of the Civil Society Pillar of the Community of Democracies. Given that role we are responsible for overseeing the Renewal Process of each Member State of the Governing Council, which is aided by their corresponding civil society organization focal point. We are very familiar with processes that involve evaluating and assessing if and how well a country abides by a certain mechanism.
So, while we are not part of UNCAC, we are already implementing activities that relate to abiding by certain principles that promote the strengthening of democracy and mitigating the impact of corruption and decreasing institutional corruption. We are looking forward to activities related to UNCAC and the UNCAC review mechanism.