The Africa4All objective is to create a new relationship between MPs and citizens from Tanzania, Kenya, Namibia, Uganda and Lesotho, by providing those African countries with an innovative open-source software solution, methodology and training in order to help their Parliaments improve the quality, transparency and efficiency of their work and provide a mechanism for interaction with citizens. Simultaneously, the citizens will be provided with a means to familiarize and be involved in the everyday functioning of democratic decision making processes.
The goal that the project aims at achieving is to educate and to strengthen the capacity and knowledge of MPs from African countries in developing and using:
- ICT Inter-parliamentary tools for their daily work;
- ICT Intra-parliamentary tools for sharing ideas and exchange experiences with their peers from other parliaments;
- ICT tools to interact with the citizens and to gather their input on legislative issues.
The target audience includes:
- MPs and IT staff from Parliaments;
- Citizens and other stakeholders, such as networks, regional bodies;
- NGOs;
- Businesses;Â
- International organizations;
- Media.
The open-source online platform's contributions are, at a glance:
- To improve the quality of services provided to citizens;
- To facilitate the work of MPs;
- To accelerate the transition to a knowledge society;
- To increase the awareness of the Parliament activities among its citizens;
Partners of this project are: Kenya National Assembly, Parliament of Lesotho National Assembly, Parliament of Namibia, Parliament of Tanzania, Parliament of Uganda and the Project Coordinator Gov2U.
Africa4all (FED 2009/216 126) is a project co funded under the 9th European Development Fund by ACP Group and EUROPAID.
Description of target users and groups
The groups/entities that will be directly and positively affected by the project are - but not limited to - the following:
- MPs and Parliamentary ICT staff from Parliaments of Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and Lesotho;
- Citizens, NGOs, businesses and other entities from Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania;
- Uganda and Lesotho as potential users of the application or participants in the awareness raising events and training;
- International organizations that work in Africa and media from Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and Lesotho as potential contributors in the dissemination of the results and the identification of synergies for the second phase of the implementation;
- Other Parliaments in East Southern Africa as potential users of the applications in a second phase.
Technology solution
An open source eParticiaption platform available for both desktop applications and mobile phones will be used.
Technology choice: Open source softwareMain results, benefits and impacts
The main benefits introduced by this action would be:
- To introduce and test an innovative eParliament framework leveraging Web 2.0 technologies as a pilot in Kenya, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and Lesotho;
- To educate MPs, Parliamentary ICT staff and citizens to leverage technology to support collaboration and active engagement in decision making processes in the society;
- To identify the challenges and barriers from the introduction of ICT in everyday functioning of Parliaments;
- To leverage project results, experiences and lessons learnt from the five trials to promote wider ICT adoption in ACP State Parliaments, but with a particular focus during the project duration on engagement with other East African and Southern African countries;Â
- To contribute to the bridging of the digital divide, enhancing the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as key enablers for poverty reduction.
Lessons learnt
The project is in progress therefore no concrete lessons learnt can be cited; so far the direct cooperation with the Parliaments participating in the project has proven to be a key factor.
Scope: International