citizen participation

May 7, 2023

Responsible mining: is it possible? The case of the Geita gold mines in Tanzania

I have recently reconnected with Alpha Ntayomba, a civil society activist from the Kigoma region in Tanzania, currently living in Morogoro. Alpha is passionate about social accountability monitoring initiatives, which can be broadly defined as what citizens do to hold government and business accountable for delivering essential services to communities. Alpha reached out to me again a few weeks ago to tell me about his work in the gold-rich Geita region, an area close to Tanzania’s second largest city, Mwanza. Here, he explains what he does to promote ‘responsible mining’ practices and better living conditions for the communities directly impacted by this lucrative extractive activity.
November 11, 2020

Social accountability in Tanzania

Social accountability is one of those phrases that has become quite commonplace in recent years. It broadly refers to what citizens can do to hold their government, the private sector and other key actors to account. For Alpha Ntayomba, a native Tanzanian born in Arusha and currently living in the Morogoro region, social accountability has become his life mission. I met him through CIVICUS, the world’s largest civil society platform. Here he explains how he came to learn about social accountability and why it is so important to him.
May 18, 2017

Domestic resource mobilisation: a view from Turkana County, Kenya

Strengthening a developing country’s finances by increasing its tax revenues, rather than depending exclusively on aid, is widely seen as the way forward in the development community. Yet, few people actually know first-hand what it takes to generate support for increasing tax revenues in a developing country – particularly at community level...
November 23, 2016

An orange world against gender-based violence

You may have not noticed – and this month there are plenty of good reasons why – but there is a massive campaign to ‘orange the world’ going on right now. Every year from 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, to 10 December, Human Rights Day, the UN organises sixteen days of worldwide activism against gender-based violence, symbolised by the colour orange. Orange hats, orange t-shirts, orange banners, orange-lit monuments – you name it...
November 1, 2016

My blog Kiliza turns one – and here’s what I have learned

October last year I started my blog. I decided to call it Kiliza, from the Swahili word for ‘listen’, to focus on what I think development and climate change professionals should do more than anything else if they actually want to help people living in poverty in the global South. Back then I believed, and still do, that for development and climate change policies to be effective it is important to first understand what people from the world’s poorest places say about international co-operation, the environment, and development and climate change themselves.
October 12, 2016

What’s happened to citizen engagement in climate change discussions since Paris?

I know, I know. In my last post I said I’d be back in September and here we are, already in mid-October. Not that I haven’t tried to write something sooner. I actually wanted to refocus on climate change discussions and see whether citizens from the global South have anything to say about the historic agreement reached in Paris at the end of last year.
May 19, 2016

Why we need a humanitarian summit

On 23-24 May the city of Istanbul hosts the world’s first-ever humanitarian summit. About 5,000 leaders from government, business and civil society will gather at the UN’s request to agree more effective ways to address some of the most challenging crises on earth. Why this meeting now? And will it really make any difference to the millions of people affected by natural disasters or conflict around the world?
January 12, 2016

Humans of My World

First few days into the new year and already my shopping list of resolutions has shrunk to a couple. Besides my eternal plan to exercise more, […]
October 7, 2015

Texting for better policies

To many David Beckham‘s meeting with the UN Secretary-General last month was just another celebrity moment to mark the universal adoption of the Global Goals — the seventeen […]
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