What do we do?
To encourage community-led development, the Early Warning System team provides and exchanges information on proposed development bank projects with communities and the groups who support them.
To increase a community’s leverage to for community-led development, the Early Warning System team reviews and verifies project information at development banks, and shares summaries with those nearest the project. On the Early Warning System web page, the project summaries can be translated into dozens of languages.
The Early Warning System team and partners can reinforce a community’s response through advice, materials and trainings. By tracking projects at the major development finance institutions, the Early Warning System team identifies trends in development financing and engages the collective expertise and priorities of communities to shift policy and practice on how development is done. .
Why do we do it?
“Development” today is largely a top-down enterprise.
Development projects and policies often originate from high-level dialogues among governments, companies, investors and development banks, leaving little opportunity for communities to offer their visions and priorities.
However, if a development bank considers using public funds to finance a project, communities and civil society may be able to learn, often for the first time, details about the proposed project and who is involved. Also, additional opportunities for participation and advocacy may be clarified as a result.
Within this opening, development banks must outline clearly the roles and activities of government, development banks, private companies and investors and should provide specifics about how people and the environment will be positively or negatively impacted. Unfortunately, even if this project information is made ‘public’ by development banks, it is often inadequate, incomplete, inaccessible or not disclosed in a timely way. To further limit access, development banks rarely translate project information into a local or even national language.
The Early Warning System team operates within this gap to exchange accessible information and advocacy options with communities and the groups supporting them to influence the design and implementation of specific projects, ideally before funding has been determined at a development bank.
Who is involved?
The Early Warning System functions through its networks, partners, and community contacts. Affiliated with the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, the Early Warning System team consists of international and national organizations who review, verify and conduct outreach on projects proposed for financing at development banks. The people and organizations who contribute to the vision, design and operations of the Early Warning System initiative are recognized as Advisors. The local, national and international organizations currently exchanging advice, materials and trainings to reinforce a community’s response to a project tracked by the Early Warning System team are recognized as Community-led Response Partners. More than 450 organizations around the world, our Partners, have signed up to receive and distribute updates on the newest proposed projects at the development banks tracked by the Early Warning System. Some people and organizations affiliated with the Early Warning System not to be listed publicly for security reasons.
What is the relationship between the Early Warning System and the institutions it monitors?
The Early Warning System is an independent, civil society-led initiative and is not funded by the development banks it tracks.
Organizations that are part of or collaborate with the Early Warning System team may engage with development banks, governments, private companies and investors on particular projects or policies. The Early Warning System seeks to advance community-led development plans and priorities. Therefore, it does not implicitly support projects or processes that are not community-led.
How do we do our work?
The Early Warning System includes ‘Nyali’ – the first civil society-led software to organize, standardize and summarize projects, from the largest and most influential development finance institutions. The growing database is updated daily and holds more than 20,000 projects proposed since 01 January 2016 and more than 6,000 private actors. The Early Warning System Team shares verified information from the database with the people nearest to the proposed project and also facilitates the exchange of information, advice, tools and resources between communities and the organizations supporting them.
Our approach works like this:
Collect and Organize: Development bank(s) propose financing for a project, and publicly disclose information on their website. The Early Warning System software, Nyali collects, standardizes and organizes this information. Files related to the project are also collected.
Verify and Summarize: The Early Warning System team verifies the information gathered and summarizes the project descriptions for clarity and accessibility. A project summary is published to the public.
Outreach: The Early Warning System Team and Partners conduct outreach to ensure that those closest to the project site who are likely to be affected receive information as soon as possible. This information is also publicly available in the Early Warning System database.
Research: If a community is interested in learning more, the Early Warning System team and Partners can assist in filing information requests and, in some instances, the Early Warning System Team can prepare a human and environmental rights risk analysis. This analysis is published to the Early Warning System database and shared back with the community and any relevant partners.
Community-led Response: If a community is interested in responding to a project, the Community Response Collective can support through various methods of community organizing and campaign strategy, including community-led research.
Updates: Partners can add relevant news, reports and campaign information to individual project summaries by sharing these materials with the Early Warning System Team.
Advocacy: The Community-led Response Partners support communities and their local partners to amplify their demands, priorities, and concerns, and can conduct advocacy with specific governments, development banks, companies and investors to influence project plans.
Trends: Data from the Early Warning System Database and from community-led research can uncover trends in the policy and practice of development by geography, sector, development finance institution or private company. As the more community-led responses are tracked, the Early Warning System team plans to highlight trends in community response.
What are the gaps in data, and what is being done to address these gaps?
Language: Communities who will be affected positively or negatively by a development bank-funded project, should not be burdened with translating information about a project into their own language. For information to be accessible, it should be available in the relevant languages for the persons involved.
Multilateral organizations, like the United Nations, have long recognized the importance of making their information accessible by language. However most development banks tracked by the Early Warning System primarily produce institutional and project information in English only. Occasionally translations are available, but translations of key documents is quite rare.
Access to information is the essence of the Early Warning System and until development banks produce information in relevant languages, we will continuously strive to find new ways of making the EWS data accessible to partners and communities. In terms of the translation, the Early Warning System has embedded translation for its website and the database. To translate any page on the Early Warning System website and on the Early Warning System Database, select a language in the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the page. Accuracy varies, so please review translations carefully.
Improving Access to Information: The Early Warning System is in the unique position to monitor both the quantity and quality of information disclosed by development banks. As a result, we are able to use the data collected to analyze trends in development finance and advocate for improved disclosure practices and access to information for communities and the civil society groups that support them.
The information provided by development banks is inconsistent and often inadequate, regularly failing to meet their own standards on access to information. In its advocacy work, the Early Warning System Team addresses these information gaps directly and does it’s best to analyze the information that is publicly disclosed. Throughout, if information is not provided publicly, the Early Warning System Database will record it as “Not Disclosed”. This serves as a record for accountability, but also these realities must be understood by researchers. For example, most but not all development banks publicly provide an official “Date of Disclosure” for all projects. Researchers are able to sort the Early Warning System Database by “Date of Disclosure” but the results will only include those projects where the information was actually documented.
Standardizing development data: The Early Warning System relies on information that is publicly disclosed by development finance institutions. As a result, the depth, breadth, and specificity of the information collected varies, and dependent upon the disclosure practices of the institutions. Each development bank has its own definitions and classifications systems. To better understand the world of development, the Early Warning System standardizes these definitions and classification into one uniform system to better assist communities and Partners in accessing information from various sources.
Disclosing private actors and co-financiers: Development banks are one actor out of many involved in the business of development. For communities responding to a project, information about the entire spectrum of players involved is often not accessible or available. To present the most complete picture of a project, the Early Warning System also works to identify other actors involved in a project, including companies and national banks, and where available, includes this information within the database and outreach. This also includes connecting projects financed by development banks with larger national, regional or internal master plans, so communities can identify potential allies affected by the same project or trends.
Currently, there is limited information publicly available about what development banks are funding through financial intermediaries. To address this lack of transparency, in 2021, the Early Warning System partnered with Oxfam International to pilot a project to incorporate information that describes the relationship among the different private actors linked to high-risk sectors and sub-projects of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) financial intermediary investments and/or the financial intermediary’s parent company made from 2017 through 2020. This data includes any associated ring fences. However, through this information, the EWS database does not explicitly or implicitly imply that IFC or FMO has material exposure to or either is contractually or legally accountable to the sub-projects financed by their financial intermediaries, or the financial intermediary’s parent companies. It only shows a seemingly financial relationship among the different private actors, the financial intermediaries, and IFC or FMO. Any mistakes or errors reported within the data points on financial relationships would be derived from the original sources (i.e. Thomson and IJ Global financial database).
The Early Warning System Partners that incorporate corporate accountability in their strategies use information from the Early Warning System Database to jump start their research and advocacy.
How can I contribute?
Individuals and organizations can contribute in different ways, depending on expertise, connections and interests.
Outreach: Is your civil society organization interested in receiving summaries about the newest projects? Can you help distribute them to the people nearest the project in your country?
Data and Tech: Are you a data expert in programming or data visualization and want to offer your skills to take the Early Warning System to another level?
Translators: Projects information is often English only. Are you able to translate documents or campaigning materials to assist access to information?
If you are interested in contributing to the Early Warning System, contact us here!