Along came a Fellowship: Civic Tech in Sierra Leone
I recently embarked on a two-month long Innovation Fellowship with Code For Sierra Leone. Exciting is an understatement. Let me explain.
As someone equally passionate about civic engagement as building stuff for the Internet, this Innovation Fellowship accords me the beautiful opportunity to share my work with like minds and in the process, help create a more open society in Sierra Leone.
As part of the Fellowship, I will be building an application that monitors the goings-on in the Sierra Leone parliament. Having built a simple tool in February 2016 to identify leadership options in Uganda’s most recent polls
, I’ve always been bothered at how quickly we collectively forget who we sent to Parliament or what they go ahead to do in the House over their term.Memba-O!, the application I’m tasked to build over the next two months, is a web application that aims to act as a parliamentary watchdog, enabling citizens to track the voting records of parliamentarians. The application will collect data on Members of Parliament and their voting and attendance records, Bills and their statuses, Committees, their membership and meeting reports. Via their accounts, citizens and other web users will be able to login and follow leaders, bills or parliamentary committees in order to get updated feeds on what they are keen on.
I intend to build this application using common web technologies; Javascript, PHP, and the database using MySQL. In the end, I hope this tool will provide a more transparent picture of what happens in the Sierra Leone parliament.
The d|Bootcamp in Sierra Leone was based on a Code for Africa model first pioneered in Kenya in 2012 that has since been adopted across the world, with 32 bootcamps hosted in 27 countries. The Freetown event follows Code for Africa’s earlier pioneering work in Sierra Leone, where it partnered with the World Bank to help kickstart data scraperthons during a 6-week Open Data Festival 2016 in March 2016. You can read about the scraperthons here.
Code for Africa (CfAfrica) is the continent’s largest independent open data and civic technology initiative. We seek to build digital democracies that give citizens timely and unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.
CfAfrica operates as a federation of autonomous country-based digital innovation organisations that support ‘citizen labs’ in nine countries and major projects in a further 15 countries. There are CfAfrica affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
CfAfrica runs Africa’s OpenGov Fellowships and also embeds Innovation Fellows into newsrooms and social justice organisations to help liberate data of public interest, or to build tools that help empower citizens.
In addition to fellowships and citizen labs, CfAfrica runs the $1 million per year#innovateAFRICA fund plus the $500,000/year #impactAFRICA fund and the $500,000/year Sandbox Fund which all award seed grants to civic pioneers for experiments with everything from camera drones and environmental sensors, to encryption for whistleblowers and data-driven semantic analysis tools for investigative watchdogs.
CfAfrica also curates continental resources such as the africanSPENDINGportal of budget transparency resources, the openAFRICAdata portal, the sourceAFRICA document repository, and the connectedAFRICA transparency toolkit for tracking the often hidden social networks and economic interests in politics.
CfAfrica is furthermore custodian of the continental 30,000 strong Hacks/Hackers community, and incubates the continent’s largest investigative journalism initiative, the African Network of Centers for Investigating Reporting (which spearheaded the #PanamaPapers investigations on the continent).
