2022 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"
16th Edition
AfricTivistes Local Open GovLab
In July 2021, AfricTivistes, the league of African bloggers and cyber-activists for democracy, brought together seven West African mayors in Dakar, Senegal for a groundbreaking seminar on local open governance that marked the official launch of the project. During this meeting, the local elected officials made a strong commitment to openness and collaboration with civil society through the use of digital technology. The approach is part of the Local Open GovLab (LOG) project implemented in partnership with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It has been a long road to get to this point and it is far from over.
Currently, AfricTivists is conducting evaluation missions in the 7 town halls in order to collect opinions and data on the lessons learned, the strengthening of the project components, among others. Thus, 4 months after the end of this first phase, a mission is dispatched in order to assess the results of the assisted path to open governance, but also to discuss the challenges faced by these communities for better participatory governance and better access to information. The purpose of the mission is to assess the momentum already gained in moving towards open governance, and consequently to work resolutely towards meeting the criteria for these communities to join the Open Governance Partnership (OGP).
During this mission, the coordination of AfricTivists will give laptops to local authorities of the 7 beneficiary communities. This gesture is a response to a request expressed by the local authorities who complained about not having technical and computer facilities to better do open local governance. Beyond the digital working environment, they also expressed the need to have stable access to internet connection and electricity (in some cases as in Dankassari and Mantakari in Niger).
One of the consequences of the experience is to orient the Mayors towards international partners so that they can be part of a dynamic of co-construction and openness for the benefit of the populations and of transparent and open governance.
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