An RTI office 'structured to fail': lessons from five years as Information Commissioner

The Right to Information (RTI) Act came into force in the Maldives in 2014. By the time I took office in September 2021, it had been on the books for seven years. In that period, cases submitted to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) averaged 50 annually. RTI requests to public authorities averaged 1,450 a year.

The question I arrived with was not why those numbers were low, but what they revealed: that seven years after the Act came into force, most citizens still had no particular reason to believe that asking a question would produce an answer.

Public authorities carry a further duty: to publish information proactively, without waiting for a request. On that duty, the record when I took office was worse still. Not a single public authority had met the threshold for compliance. Not one.

During my five years, cases submitted to ICO averaged 531 a year, a tenfold increase. RTI requests to public authorities averaged 3,426 annually – more than double the previous rate.

I want to be careful about how I read these numbers, because they are easy to misread. They are not primarily a story about the ICO becoming more efficient, though I believe it did. They are a story about public behaviour. People do not file complaints if they believe nothing will happen. They do not submit RTI requests if they think the system is not worth engaging with. The growth in these numbers is evidence of something more important than institutional performance – it is evidence of growing public confidence that the right to information is a right worth exercising.

On proactive disclosure, the shift was equally significant. By the end of my term, more than 30 public authorities had reached the compliance threshold. Zero to 30 is not a complete transformation, and it is a small share of the total. But it is a beginning, and it matters.

The RTI Act obliges ICO to hold open hearings. We did that – but we went further. Every hearing was streamed live on YouTube, so that any citizen, anywhere in the Maldives or beyond, could watch and listen in real time, or access the recording at any point afterwards. Transparency about the process of enforcing a transparency law is the only honest way to do it.

We also invested in a digital platform – the Mahoali portal – making it simpler for citizens to file requests and track their progress. The total number of requests made through the portal surpassed the 10,000 mark earlier this year. And we conducted, with Transparency Maldives and the Centre for Law and Democracy, a comprehensive national RTI assessment: the first evidence-based picture of where compliance stands across public authorities in the Maldives, and one of only a handful of such assessments completed anywhere in the world.

That last point connects to something I am particularly proud of. When I took office, the Maldives was not a member of any international network in the field of access to information. By the end of 2022, ICO had joined both the International Conference of Information Commissioners (ICIC) and the Asian Access to Information Alliance (AAIA). More than membership, we became active contributors to the international conversation – recognised as a working model for small island developing states navigating the practical challenges of building RTI infrastructure with limited resources. That recognition did not come from size or budget. It came from the quality and integrity of the work.

Throughout all of this, ICO maintained something that is genuinely rare among independent institutions in the Maldives: a high level of public trust and confidence. That trust was not inherited. It was earned, case by case, hearing by hearing, through decisions made on the merits and not on convenience.

Successive governments treated RTI as, at best, an administrative inconvenience. Over the course of my term, I heard the argument that RTI is frequently abused. That transparency creates problems. That the volume of requests is evidence of misuse rather than engagement. I disagree with that view entirely.

The right to information is a constitutional right in the Maldives. It is not a favour that governments extend to citizens at their discretion. It is a right that citizens hold, and that governments are obligated to uphold. When officials describe RTI as a burden, what they are really describing is the discomfort of accountability. That discomfort is precisely the point.

A government that is comfortable with transparency has nothing to fear from RTI. A government that resists it is telling the public something important about itself.

I leave office with pride in what was built – and with honesty about what was not.

The backlog of cases at ICO is growing. Complaints and appeals have increased substantially, and the office does not have the staffing or resources to keep pace. This is a resourcing failure, and it belongs to those who hold the budget, not to the staff who have stretched themselves to cover it.

The ICO is one of the least invested institutions in the country – and that is saying something in a system where underfunding of independent bodies is common. With the level of financial constraint placed on ICO, it is not an exaggeration to say that the institution has been structured to fail. An institution cannot fulfil a constitutional mandate on goodwill and determination alone. It requires money, people, and genuine autonomy. The ICO's independence is guaranteed in law. It has not been delivered in practice. Administrative and financial dependence on the executive undermines the very independence that makes an oversight body meaningful. An ICO that cannot hire, cannot fund its operations, and cannot act without executive approval is not independent in any meaningful sense – regardless of what the legislation says.

And despite the progress on proactive disclosure, more than 30 public authorities reaching compliance means that the overwhelming majority have not. Changing that habit, from disclosing on demand to disclosing by default, remains the hardest and most important work still ahead.

There is also a human cost to chronic underfunding that rarely gets discussed: the ICO is unable to retain its staff. The pay structure for ICO employees is lower than comparable positions across the public sector. We lose good people – trained, capable, committed people – to institutions that simply pay more. An institution is only as good as the people in it. When the funding model makes it structurally impossible to hold onto your staff, the damage is not just operational. It is institutional.

I want to say something plainly about the people who stayed. The ICO staff functioned under extraordinary strain that would have overwhelmed most institutions. Limited resources, inadequate facilities, pay that did not reflect the weight of what they were doing, and a mandate that required them to make decisions that powerful people did not always welcome. They did it anyway. What the ICO achieved in five years belongs to them as much as to anyone.

RTI systems do not sustain themselves. They require institutions with the independence, the resources, and the political backing to function – and they require a public that knows its rights and believes they are enforceable.

For the Maldives to have an RTI system that works, three things must happen.

First, the ICO must be properly resourced – with adequate staffing and budget, and genuine financial independence. 

Second, proactive disclosure must be enforced, not merely encouraged. The progress made during my term shows that compliance is achievable – but it did not happen spontaneously. It happened because of sustained engagement, monitoring, and pressure. That effort must continue and intensify. The burden of information access should not fall entirely on citizens who have to ask. Governments should be disclosing as a matter of course.

Third, public awareness must be treated as a strategic priority. Citizens cannot exercise a right they do not know they have. Investment in RTI literacy – in schools, in communities, in media – is not optional. It is the foundation on which everything else rests.

The right to information is sometimes discussed as a technical matter – a question of regulations and compliance timelines and portal functionality. It is all of those things. But it is also something more fundamental.

When a citizen asks a question of their government and receives an honest answer, something important has happened. Power has been made accountable. Information that belongs to the public has been returned to them. A democratic right has been made real – not on paper, but in practice.

That is what the right to information is for. And that is the standard against which everything else – the cases, the portals, the budgets – must ultimately be measured.

Five years was not enough to get us there. But it was enough to prove that the journey is possible.

Ahmed Ahid Rasheed served as Information Commissioner from 2021 to 2026.