Hatua Project: Taking Innovative Steps towards Advancing Citizen Engagement in Tanzania
Narrated by Basil Malaki
Hatua Project is an initiative aimed at taking steps towards enriching innovative and inclusive citizen engagement.
There is a significant rise in the number of initiatives run by different organizations with an interest in promoting good governance for social and economic development of most African communities.
Good governance is often expressed through factors such as reliability, accountability, transparency, predictability, responsibility, responsiveness - to the needs of the people. A recent partnership has seen Sahara Sparks and Buni Hub partner with Making All Voices Count (MAVC) to promote technology as a vital tool for good governance, this initiative has been well received by Tanzanian communities that have already had a chance to voice their opinions through the Grassroot Citizen Engagement(GCE) components of the project that is a sub component of the projects three major components which also include; Code4Citizens (C4C) which will see technology startups crack good governance shortcomings with innovative tech solutions, the other sub components of the Hatua project is; Tech4Gov (T4G) which is an abbreviation of ‘technology for governance’, in this sub component, stakeholders from various companies, public and private institutions will be called upon to engage with citizens in open focused group discussions (FGD) to discuss innovative ways technology can be used to advance good governance and citizen engagement.
Hatua project recently visited the people of Sima village, Sengerema - Mwanza district in Tanzania where we conducted our very first GCE community meetup. Our main purpose for the visit was to listen to the voices of the community on very specific issues of high priority to the community.
The people of Sima Village came out in their hundreds, we registered 450+ people in attendance of our very first gathering, 68% of the population being women whereas 30% of the population were men, children constituted 2% of the population. 84% of the population were elderly people aged 35 and above, the rest of the population estimated at 16% were youths of age 35 and below, the event was also graced by 3 differently enabled persons. In attendance were small scale business owners, fishermen, farmers, civil servants, students among others.
We partnered with Elimu Living Lab (E-Labs), the most responsive community based lab in Sengerema to make our engagement with the community effective, we approached Sima residents with an un structured event dubbed ‘the un-conferencing’ event; the name of the event was inspired by the formal structure in which the normal conferences are conducted, we decided to un package the norm and serve the Sima residents with an event with zero protocols and status-quo unlike the everyday conferences, from our past experience in dealing with local communities, we have come to learn that the best way to get civilians to voice out their grievances freely is to completely immerse yourself in their cultures, speak a language that resonates so well with their daily lives and they will open up to voice their deepest grievances, the people indeed opened up and shared their opinions with us.
We held a very interactive session after lunch break that to some extent raised too much expectations from the residents to demand for instant solutions from us, from our round table discussions we quoted one aged woman saying, ‘sisi tunaomba mungu atupe maji, na nyinyi mtupe msaada’, this Swahili phrase loosely translates to, ‘we pray to God to provide us with water, and from you (the Hatua Project representatives) we need help’, the residents were clearly hungry for solutions , in our defense, we were accompanied by local government authorities led by our chief guest, the local chairman of the municipal council, predominantly known as ‘mwenyekiti wa halmashauri’, Mr. Silvanus Bulapilo who promised to act on the residents’ concerns and provide them with solutions in the future after reviewing the needs of the people in collaboration with the local and central government authorities.
We need not to forget that many aspects of good governance are still poorly understood and may vary across communities, for our engagement with the Sima residents to be more objective we narrowed our focus to a specific focal point, ‘Mfuko wa Vijana wa Maendeleo - Youth Development Fund’, we then formulated some basic questions which include;
- The availability of the youth development fund — Do youths have access to loans/funds that can meet their demands?
- The availability of information to the local community on the most critical challenges they are faced with — Is information available that address challenges the community is faced with?
- Challenges of re-paying money lent to entrepreneurs — What are the challenges faced by locals that make them unable to repay their loans in due time?
- What can be done differently to advance the mode, terms and conditions of loaning SME’s?
- Do loaning institutions offer pre-conditions to lending before issuing out loans to local businesses?
We formulated very basic questions, we expected not to find basic answers, and we were served right and equally shocked that the root problem of most issues that rose from our engagement with the locals were as a result of;
- Illiteracy,
- Inadequate of information
- Laxity of authorities to provide solutions to some notable challenges such as lack of water which could be solved by drilling boreholes using taxpayers money among others.
Our engagement with the community was also met by a few notable challenges which include, language barrier and harsh weather conditions (extreme heat from the Mwanza sun and dust).
Promoting Good Governance
It is notable that recent activities of the government have positively indicated a change in the accountability and transparency system of almost all government institutions in Tanzania.
Most people who are pro government would argue that more attention is being paid by the current government on resource allocation, utilization and management of public resources, as a result, they are content that Tanzania is headed towards the right direction of achieving social and economic development. However, this notion of good governance is only noticed and credited by pro-government supporters, anti-government organizations such as civil society organizations in governance and the opposition would strongly disagree with this school of thought, their critic views always tend to oppress, demean and rubbish the government efforts in providing solutions to the people.
Efforts made by the Hatua Project initiative in partnership with Making All voices Count, Sahara Sparks and Buni Hub to promote a three component; T4G, C4C and GCE project aimed at supporting the government efforts in taking the most effective steps in the approach aimed at strengthening good governance with the application of technology solution targeting Tanzanian citizens from diverse communities are more relevant and needed today more than ever before since we understand that the government cannot stand alone without the aid of organized initiatives that can provide the government with reliable resourceful data that describe the real situation in areas that are still marginalized and under developed. We manage to achieve all this through encouraging citizens to come out in organized groups to take part in the decision making process of the country’s resources which has prompted a significant rise of participatory budgeting campaigns that have proved to be effective in some communities.
Call for action:
We are therefore calling upon all technology and governance stakeholders, local and central government authorities to connect with us in the Hatua Project, we need support from all key players looking at making an impact in advancing Civic technology and technology for governance through the Hatua Project to get intouch with us via our official communication mediums listed below;
Twitter: @hatuaproject
Facebook: Hatua Project
Instagram: @hatuaproject
Follow our updates on Buni Hub website: www.buni.or.tz, Sahara Sparks website: www.saharasparks.com and the official Hatua Website: www.hatuaproject.org and Making All Voices Count website: www.makingallvoicescount.org
For more information, get in touch with:
Basil Malaki
abarzil@gmail.com
T: @basilmalaki
Skype: abarzil1
Cell: +255 762 755 456
