Twaweza East Africa’s Post

Transcript

Access to information is an underlying driver of the open government partnership process, and for the very first time, Kenya had a constitution that explicitly mentioned the right to access information and explicitly recognized it in the Bill of Rights and Article 35 of the Constitution. This was incredibly ambitious and this was a new sort of provision for Kenya. And So what meant is that we needed to figure out how this right could be effectively implemented and how citizens would be able to enjoy this right. The people are sovereign because vision is very clear that their sovereignty, their government, it must be accountable, it must be transparent. There must be no corruption. When they seek information, they need to get information. There's nothing to hide. So we had the clash. It's like you don't want to be government. Government is Syria Kalis. You know, many things are not supposed to be told but to common people. Surgically is award for a reason. In Kenya, as a people, we are not used to proactively providing information. We are used to guarding information very secretly and so the concept of access to information was very much a foreign in this context. None of the information that you find now was actually available, and if it was, it was very difficult for either citizens to access it, citizens to understand it, or citizens to even be able to utilize it in a manner that would allow them to make informed decisions. So for US, Open Parliament or legislative transparency means then going beyond the basic to deepening that level of openness so that citizens not only have deeper access to information, but also can be able to. Make informed and their voices can count. We always say access to information is a citizen driven, right. It means if the citizens are not asking that information, then you cannot enjoy that, right? So it's a lot of awareness around that. Now the county government has come up with a portal. We are by, you can see even when the process of contracting started. Until they the tendering process was done, until the selection was done, who was selected and even the awarding. And if it is a particular ward which projects. A particular financial year are being budgeted for or we are being done through contracting process. So you can see this is where the 30 million has been allocated and those are the projects which the people save themselves, not the projects that were brought by the count. Providing the stage to provide thought leadership and role modeling across the continent. Set the international agenda. There's a social contract here and it's the leadership and the people, and you need to run government so that with them they benefit. That process is what makes these ideas of transparent government, inclusive government, accountable government mean real things for many, many millions. Of citizens.