Introduction

Welcome to the “Kakum Social Accountability online installation guide, an online resource that provides development practitioners, government agencies and civil society with a step-by-step approach to integrating digital tools into social accountability (SA) mechanisms. This guide comes at an opportune time where social accountability play a central role in promoting and ensuring governments are accountable, transparent and representative and aid also duty bearers in developing and implementing policies that meets the needs of citizens. The “Kakum” guide will enable users design online tools that will enable effective civic engagement in which ordinary citizens and civil society play vital roles in monitoring public goods and service delivery.

This guide is designed to assist practitioners design, develop and accomplish the following tasks:
  • Build the capacity of project teams in the use of Kakum
  • Scope potential entry points for introducing kakum new digital tools to enable citizens to be actively involved in social accountability
  • Provided an alternative options for selecting and sequencing SA tools that can help improve transparency, accountability, and participation

The Kakum E-guide is not meant to be prescriptive but rather an alternative option that can be added to existing tools already being deployed by project teams. The Kakum platform is designed to complement other social accountability tools such as Participatory Planning; Participatory Budgeting; Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS); Citizen Report Cards; Social Audits; Community Score Card; Public Hearing, etc. It is the hope of Penplusbytes this guide will be a “living” document, which will be regularly updated and improved based on experiences from using new digital tools in social accountability projects and also with contributions from the Social Accountability Community of Practice.

Architectural Design

Acknowledgements

This website was conceptualised with guidance and inputs from a number of people across the Penplusbytes Network, which includes staff members, technology consultants and ultimately citizens who are the end-users of the platform. These persons have made many valuable contributions to the design, look and feel of the website without which the website would not have much of the content, both words and pictures that it contains.

The kakum online platform (platformafrica.net) which forms part of the “Tech Driven Social Accountable for Results” is very appreciative for the financial assistance by the project funders, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA). In particular, the project will like to thank officials from the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection as well as the School Feeding Programme Secretatriat and the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme head-office for supplying the respective policy documents to be shared with citizens.

Last but not the least, a big thank you to Infosol Solution and Village Pixels who did all the design and technical work on the site and continues to help to maintain it.

What is the Kakum?

The Kakum platform developed by Penplusbytes is a collaborative and an integrated tool which enhances communication and information sharing between citizens and government. The platform innovatively combines an online platform, emails, SMS, social media and a mobile application to support citizen ability to actively engage duty-bearers in planning, implementation and monitoring government budgets, plans and policies.

The web-based Kakum platform has over the years been deployed to enable citizens monitor, share their experiences on government policies in key areas such as health and education. The platform has also been used to enable citizens contribute to the formulation of government development plans and budgets both at the national and sub-national level.

Penplusbytes is currently using the Kakum to implement the project “Tech Driven Social Accountability for Results” project which is intended to use new digital tools which will contribute to citizens’ ability to hold government to account within the framework of political and social accountability.

Kakum target groups
  • Citizens
  • Community Based Organisations
  • Civil Society Organisations
  • Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies
  • Academia
Assumptions
  • The implementation of Kakum will focus primary in creating an avenue for citizens engagement and participation in monitoring government interventions.
  • All hosting and database resources will be supplied by the partnering organisation
  • Management of customized Kakum platform will be undertaken by the partnering organization
Dependencies/ External Systems
  • Facebook – User Identification
  • Twitter – User Identification
  • SMS integration
  • Mobile App integration

Goals The goal of kakum is to provide solutions citizens are already familiar with, that can effectively and efficiently channel their voices in holding government to account via an innovative, easy to use, interactive online and mobile-based platform.

This bold and ground breaking approach ensures significant level of success while leading to greater impact.

After successful customization of the Kakum platform, the app should be deliver the following:
  • Project Managers should be able to add new projects to the platform
  • Project Managers should be able to add policies/issues to be tracked on the platform
  • Project Managers should be able to filter/categorize various issues into groups such as Health, Education, etc.
  • Citizens should be able to browse all government policies and issues that has been added to the platform.
  • Citizens should be able to rate policies on the following parameters – “excellent”, “good”, “bad” or “neutral”
  • Citizens should be able to provide feedback (and raise issues) on policies added on the platform.
  • Citizens should be able to submit policies/issues which are of priority to them to be tracked. This should be vetted by Project Managers before being approved to be made available on the platform.
  • Citizens should be able to raise issues that may be unrelated to any of the policies originally logged on the system.
  • Project Managers should be able to provide updates back to citizens (clearly marked either as official responses from questions they have raised, or as general information received from various official sources)
  • Project Managers should be able to update the status of comments and other content provided by Citizens, and tag comments such as “unresolved” (default), and “resolved”

Key Term Definitions

Project Managers: Project Managers can create accounts for other Project Managers, and can moderate content shared on the Kukum Website. There is always at least one Community Manager in the system.

Public Official: Public Officials can provide Official Responses to Issues/Comments raised on their policies, and they can provide Progress Reports (backed by source). Content provided by Public Officials is clearly identified as such within the User Interface.

Project Managers can either create Public Official User accounts or upgrade regular accounts as Public Officials.

Citizen: Citizens can register to use the application or login with their Facebook/Twitter accounts/Google Accounts, and then be able to provide reports and follow policies and issues and also receive alerts.

Community Monitoring Group: These are “trusted sources” within project communities. They provide input into the platform from citizens who are not able to.