The Africa4All project, today announced the Online dialogue on poverty reduction and maternal health launched by five African Parliaments on www.africa4all.net, which is intended to facilitate a genuine dialogue between citizens and parliamentarians within the African context.
The project aims to create a new relationship between Members of the Parliaments (MPs) and citizens, by providing an innovative open-source software solution, methodology and training in order to help African Parliaments improve the quality, transparency and efficiency of their work and provide a mechanism for interaction with citizens. Simultaneously, the citizens will be provided with a means to become familiarized and involved with the everyday functioning of democratic decision making processes.
The purpose that the project thus aims to achieve is to educate and strengthen the capacity and knowledge of MPs from African countries to use ICT tools:
- Inter-parliamentary for their daily work
- Intra-parliamentary for sharing ideas and exchange experiences with their peers from other parliaments.
- To interact with the citizens and to gather their input to legislative issues.
Africa4All partners include: Parliament of Lesotho National Assembly, Parliament of Namibia, Parliament of Tanzania, Parliament of Uganda, Kenya National Assembly and the Project Coordinator Gov2U.
On the Africa4All platform you can find the Civic Bench – a secure section dedicated to citizens’ participative processes. These processes represent public debates on specific policy issues of common public interest. Currently the two themes of Poverty Reduction and Maternal Health have been identified as priority areas during our first capacity building workshop which took place in Durban during May 2010. Having achieved our first milestone of eliciting feedback and participation from African MPs, we now invite you to participate in the discussion forums associated with the participative processes you are interested in, read the documents and fill in the questionnaires associated with those processes. In addition to the Civic Bench, we also encourage you to engage with the Letter to Legislator section, the events calendar as well as the individual parliamentary pages of each participating country.
The benefits of participating are:
- Full participation in an innovative EU funded project
- Access to training and knowledge sharing materials
- Being kept informed of the latest developments in the field
- Access to a carefully selected stakeholder group
Our target audience includes individuals from the wider African community that are:
MPs and IT staff from Parliaments, Citizens and other stakeholders such as networks, regional bodies, NGOs, Businesses, International organizations and the media.
We are very interested in your opinion and would like to include your involvement in the project. Please feel free to contact us directly, or fill out the observer questionnaire on the project’s website.
For more information please visit: www.africa4all.net or contact us at info@gov2u.org
