Sensors, empowerment, and accountability: a Digital Earth view from East Africa

Abstract

Several innovative 'participatory sensing' initiatives are under way in East Africa. They can be seen as local manifestations of the global notion of Digital Earth. The initiatives aim to amplify the voice of ordinary citizens, improve citizens' capacity to directly influence public service delivery and hold local government accountable. The popularity of these innovations is, among other things, a local reaction to the partial failure of the millennium development goals (MDGs) to deliver accurate statistics on public services in Africa. Empowered citizens, with access to standard mobile phones, can 'sense' via text messages and report failures in the delivery of local government services. The public disclosure of these reports on the web and other mass media may pressure local authorities to take remedial action. In this paper, we outline the potential and research challenges of a 'participatory sensing' platform, which we call a 'human sensor web.' Digital Africa's first priority could be to harness continent-wide and national data as well as local information resources, collected by citizens, in order to monitor, measure and forecast MDGs.

Accountability as an element of governmentality: an investigation of national and local executive accountability practices in the water section in Tanzania

“…It was noticed that citizens reported problems on water to independent parties, who they trust that they could forward their problems to officials, rather than directly reporting to official authorities. This situation led to the recognition that "other media and community channels may be equally more important for citizens than the HSW" (Georgiadou et al, 2011). Thus, there was a need to study more on citizens reporting behaviour.…”

“…The second group consists of front-office ICT initiatives, which are largely, mobile phone-driven, designed to improve the communication relations between the state and citizens. The front-office initiatives are aimed at amplifying the voice of ordinary citizens, improve citizens 'capacity to directly influence public service delivery and hold local government accountable' (Georgiadou et al, 2011). The main assumption is that empowered citizens, with access to standard mobile phones, can 'sense' via text messages and report failures in the delivery of local government services.…”

“…Empower Programme' was that citizens would use their mobile phones to report the lack or poor quality of water at a public water point. This would be followed by data collection, anonymization as well as publicly disclosing the data in real time on the internet through Google maps to be viewed by stakeholders including, NGOs, government officials as well as citizens (Georgiadou et al, 2011). The objective of publishing information was that once these actors get the right information on the state of water quality, the will take subsequent actions to solve water problems.…”

“…Over the past decade, the region has witnessed a quadrupling of the number of mobile subscribers and connections. In Tanzania With increasing number of mobile phone users, the potential for facilitating new communication channels between government and citizens to improve governance and accountability is increasingly being acknowledged in studies about ICTs and governance (Dziodonu, 2010;Dickinson and Bostoen 2013;Georgiadou et al, 2011;Hutchings et al, 2012;Pearce, Welle and Dickinson, 2013;Pearce, Dickinson and Welle, 2015;Thompson, 2004;Wesselink et al, 2015). This is part of ICTs' imagined promises of good governance, including accountability (Wesselink et al, 2015).…”

“…They identify challenges such as: dilapidated infrastructure (Daily News, 2010;Dill, 2010;The Guardian, 2013;Kjellen, 2006), community-based urban water management in fringe neighborhoods and participatory evaluation of community-based water and sanitation programmes (Kaliba, 2002;Kyessi, 2005), corruption (Kroliwoski, 2014;Stalgren, 2006), rendering existing water services more sustainable for the citizens (Pearce et al, 2016), the deterioration of water facilities a few years after construction (Jimenez and Perez-Foguet, 2010), failure to repair water infrastructure due to capacity and funding problems at local levels (Mandara et al, 2013), vandalism of the water infrastructure (Deule, 2010;Kjellen, 2006;Pigeon, 2012), informal markets (Kjellen, 2000;Nganyanyuka et al, 2014), leakages in the water infrastructure (Daily News, 2013;The Citizen 2013), and the general mismanagement of the water sector in Tanzania, including the information management systems and donor influences (Georgiadou et al, 2011;Rottenberg, 2002).…”