Indigo's Transparency and Accountability Funding

The Indigo Trust

Funding transparency and accountability in Africa

Transparency and Accountability in Africa

The case for action:

• There are no African countries inside the top 30 of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index of 174 states in 2012.

• Freedom House only considers 10 of the 54 recognised African states as being fully free in its 2013 State of Freedom in the World Report.

• According to African Union estimates, the continent loses some $148 billion, equivalent to 25% of GDP, due to corruption every year.

Mobiles and ICT in Africa73% of the world’s mobile phones are found in developing countries.

In Africa over half the population has access to a mobile phone and it is estimated that by 2020 this access could reach 100%

95% of phone users are on pre-pay plans

Internet usage has now reached 12% and is growing fast with new submarine cables allowing better speeds and mobile internet allowing access even in the most rural areas.

The African mobile and internet market is as innovative and context-driven as anywhere – “Please call me” texts and mobile money like M-PESA are African innovations that have changed millions of lives. M-PESA now handles 11% of Kenyan GDP and more than one billion “please call me” texts are sent for free every month.

The Indigo Trust funds those applying innovative mobile and

internet technologies to issues of transparency and accountability in order to empower citizens to fulfil an active and assertive role in the processes governing their lives…

Indigo Funding areas

Healthreceived £10,000 to set-up an SMS platform for patients to report problems with the healthcare system. GACC’s team then works hard to resolve complaints and improve service.

CIPESA have also received £12,000 for health mapping and reporting in Uganda.

Neighbourhoodreceived £12,000 for their ‘Lungisa’

project which will allow residents of Cape Town to report on a host

of local government services including water, sewage, schooling,

policing and more.

Simple (online) CartographyIn Kibera, one of Nairobi’s most notorious slums, citizens don’t even have something a simple as a map of where they live. The Map Kibera Trust received £11,320 to improve its citizen-led digital mapping of the area. As simple map can have huge advantages for advocacy, service provision and personal safety.

ViolenceSisi ni Amani-Kenya were awarded $18,158 for

improvements to their PEACE TXT platform designed to map and prevent violence. This platform even undertakes

a basic demographic analysis of those reporting so as to target the most effective messages and advice to users.

Mapping and

Reporting

Our association with mySociety has been a long one. Sites like fixmystreet.com, theyworkforyou.com and

whatdotheyknow.com are important tools that empower citizens in Britain. Together we are working to bring more applications like these to various African states with a grant of £40,000. This project has already had some success…

Developed by Ghanaian software developers Hutspace, in collaboration with mySociety, Indigo awarded £9,400 for Odekro which allows Ghanaians to monitor their parliament and MPs and gives them free access to Hansard.

Funded by The Omidyar Network the Mzalendo team worked with mySociety to launch this

parliamentary monitoring website in Kenya.

Parliamentary Transparency

As well as opening up parliaments Indigo aims to increase access to the legislation they enact…

Accessing and Understanding Legislation

Indigo awarded £7,000 to a project based at the

Co-Creation Hub in Nigeria for a Nigerian

Constitution App. Available on multiple

platforms this app has now been downloaded

in excess of 700,000 times!

£22,672 was awarded to the African and Seychelles Legal Information Institutes to develop an e-book for the laws of the Seychelles. Often judges and lawyers do not have access to the latest laws and cases when making their arguments in court.

The Constitutional Excerpts project at UCL does vital work. Constitutions are the very basis of law in most countries so Indigo gave the project £30,370 to undertake XML tagging on the world’s constitutions and thus make them more user friendly to online communities.

Making Government Accountable

to All

A grant of £36,800 should allow the collaboration needed with the Open Knowledge Foundation to dramatically improve this clever website which keeps a close eye on budgetary spending in Nigeria. The current additions should see the 2013 National Budget as well as six state budgets become fully visualised and open to online interrogation. BudgIT should allow Nigerian citizens to gain a much greater understanding of where the money goes and how to argue for change.

iWatch allows Nigerians to compare the

promises made by government with the results on the ground

and, crucially, have their say about projects great and small that might be

over budget or even delivered early! A grant of £5,000 was awarded

to develop this useful tool which will help

hold the government to account by recording

their promises for posterity and allowing

the easy measurement of progress.

We also realise that we have a responsibility to be transparent and accountable here at Indigo…

We have made a grant of £10,000 to the Open Aid Register to develop their website which allows smaller foundations and charitable trusts to publish there grant data in the standardised XML format required by international aid registers like IATI. This tool allows small operations like ours to demonstrate their commitment to transparency.

The Transparency and Accountability Initiative has convened a New

Technology Sub Group with the help of the Indigo Trust, The Omidyar Network,

Open Society Foundation, The World Bank and Hivos to help innovate new ways to make our field of work more closely aligned with these important

goals.

Other examples in the field

services.gov.ngAcross Europe governments have ever more advanced websites to help citizens access public services. Nigeria’s recently launched government website attempts to bring this level of information and service to those with the internet.

Parliament Watch has been monitoring various German

Parliaments for some time. Marsad is a project with the Tunisian

organisation Al Bawsala which aims to monitor the country’s

Constituent Assembly to ensure the new constitution is produced in a

manner that is both transparent and accountable.

The African Development Bank has produced an Open Data Portal as part of its “Africa Information Highway” initiative. The platform is growing all the time and currently displays key economic data for 30 African nations. The data is well presented and can be easily manipulated. High quality access to relatively simple economic information like this is an important development. Not only can it improve our understanding of the differences between countries but it can also help formulate better policy and business plans.

Mapping projects have become commonplace in Africa and elsewhere. One of the best ways to learn about the field is through Ushahidi; one of the original platforms for this type of activity which came into being during the violence that followed the 2007 Presidential Elections in Kenya. The following projects all utilise the Ushahidi platform in some way.

Evidence, data and research

Avila, Feigenblatt, Heacock and Heller (2010) “Global Mapping of technology for transparency and accountability” Transparency and Accountability Initiative. Available here.

Grönlund, Heacock & Sasaki, Hellström, Al-Saqaf (2010) “Increasing Transparency and Fighting Corruption through ICT” Spider Centre. Available here.

Mandlebaum (2011) “Strengthening Parliamentary Accountability, Citizen Engagement and Access to Information: A Global Survey of Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations” National Democratic Institute and World Bank Institute. Available here.

Ostling (2012) “Parliamentary Informatics Project – Who are their users and what is their impact?” Journal of eDemocracy, 4(2): 279-300. Available here.

Sarrazin (2011) “Texting, Tweeting, Mobile Internet. New Platforms for Democratic Debate in Africa” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Available here.

UNDP (2012) “Mobile Technologies and Empowerment: Enhancing Human Development through participation and innovation” Available here.

Waema and Adera (2011) “Local governance and ICTs in Africa – case studies and guidelines for implementation and evaluation” Available here.

Websites:The Spider Centre works on ICT4D from Stockholm University:http://www.spidercenter.org/

The Opening Parliament Project and Blog:http://blog.openingparliament.org/

Ushahidi was one of the most influential and early citizen mapping tools:http://www.ushahidi.com/

mySociety have a number of projects based around accountability:http://www.mysociety.org/

Parliament Watch is a German parliamentary monitor with global ambitions:http://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de/international-248-0.html