This book is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of twenty-three information and communication technology (ICT) platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery. Focusing on empirical studies of initiatives in the global south, the authors highlight both citizen uptake and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice.
The first evaluation looks at U-report in Uganda, a mobile platform that runs weekly large-scale polls with young Ugandans on a number of issues, ranging from safety to access to education to inflation to early marriage. The following evaluation takes a closer look at MajiVoice, an initiative that allows Kenyan citizens to report, through multiple channels, complaints with regard to water services.
The third evaluation examines the case of Rio Grande do Sul’s participatory budgeting – the world’s largest participatory budgeting system – which allows citizens to participate either online or offline in defining the state’s yearly spending priorities. While the comparative study has a clear focus on the dimension of government responsiveness, the evaluations examine civic technology initiatives using five distinct dimensions, or lenses. The choice of these lenses is the result of an effort bringing together researchers and practitioners to develop an evaluation framework suitable to civic technology initiatives.
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This paper is one of a series of thematic reviews produced by the Fund Manager of the Girls’ Education Challenge, an alliance led by PwC, working with organisations including FHI 360, Nathan Associates and Social Development Direct.
Innovation involves applying information, imagination and initiative to get greater or different value from resources, and includes all processes by which new ideas are generated and converted into useful processes or products.
This paper seeks to determine the comparative opportunities and limitations of ‘new’ and ‘old’ data sources for early warning, crisis response, and violence research. The authors compare the information set produced through social media violence reporting with conventional violence reporting around the August and October 2017 Kenyan elections. Specifically, they leverage data from a sample of social media reports of violence through public posts to Twitter. These reports are compared with events coded from media and published sources coded by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) along three dimensions: (1) the geography of violence reporting; (2) the temporality of reporting; and (3) the targeting of reporting.
“Community Protocols in Africa” explores the lessons that Natural Justice has learned while working with communities to implement Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) through the use of a legal empowerment tool: Community Protocols.