Luwero District Local Government ready for the ICT platform for social accountability

The Deputy District Chief Administrative Officer, Mr. Oketayot C.  James assured a team of Civil Society Organization under CEW-IT consortium, that the District is willing to embrace the e-society platforms for social accountability.

James, stated that as long as the platform assures verification of the content uploaded, its a good contributions to enabling receiving feedback on service delivery from the citizens to whom the District serves.

This was supported by the District Chief Finance Officer (CFO) Mr. Segawa Godfrey who asked the CSOs to raise awareness about the project from not only the civil servants but the Political leaders and the Citizens who own the District. He preferred that this sensitization should be in local languages and embracing all the media channels.

The CFO asked the District Information officer (DIO) Ms Nakibuuka Stellah to prioritize the e-society components costs such as contribution to website hosting, e-library in her department budget when the CSO contribution ends in December 2014.

On their part, CSO representative led by Ms Rose Nanyonjo from FRHI and Mr. John Silco from RIC-NET assured the District civil servants leaders that their organization commit to develop a dynamic website, e-library, a bulk sms platform, a citizens voice (feedback) platform and support training of the District staff to maintain these platforms. The domain name registrations and hosting charges for all theses platforms will be met by the CSO with support from HIVOS and EU for 24 months. The CSO asked the District to request for the originally Domain name www.luwero.go.ug from UCC so as the district identify is continued. At this point a question was asked about the linkage between this project and e-government initiative of the government to which CSO members said that he two projects are complimentary.

Members of the CSO fraternity assured the District that this is part of the project that is enhancing Social Accountability in 25 Districts of the 5 regions in Uganda. The informed meeting that its regional implemented by RWECO, FHRI, ACORD, PAC Uganda and CEFORD in Rwenzori, Central, Teso, Acholi and West Nile regions respectively. All these effort are coordinated by CEW-IT (Citizens Election Watch –IT ) and RIC-NET is the ICT partner of all the consortium members.

The DCAO ended the roundtable discussion appreciating the efforts of CSO towards the District on Social accountability and promised the District leaders will sign the MOU with FHRI when properly printed as they had found no problem with the draft that was provided.