THE CIVIC VOICES PROJECT:

CONSULTATIVE TRAINING WITH NAIROBI COUNTY GOVERNMENT PUBLIC PARTICIPATION OFFICERS.

CONCEPT PAPER

Date: 22nd September, 2023

Venue: Clarion Hotel, Nairobi

INTRODUCTION

The Civic Voices Project is an initiative towards digitized public participation in Kenya. The initiative is founded on the principle that meaningful public participation is impossible to achieve, with limited access to information and selective public engagement. Digitized public participation helps overcome these challenges, building better communities founded on democracy, peace, and justice. The project works through Civic Voices, an online platform for public participation. The goal is to make public participation easier, inclusive, and more effective.

BACKGROUND

Public participation is a fundamental right of the people of Kenya, designed to promote democracy and enhance development by devolving decision-making power and responsibility in governance, down to the people. However, effective public participation has been difficult to achieve due to limited access to information, cost constraints, exclusion of the majority and limited channels for people to directly engage with their governments. Statically, more than 90.5% of the country's adult population is excluded from public participation. Bills, policies and development initiatives proposed, therefore, fail to speak to the needs of the people, deepening inequality and propagating conflict instead.

Through the project, Civic Voices was built; an intuitive and easy-to-use mobile platform where citizens can learn about proposed policies, laws and development initiatives, and submit their opinions on them. It empowers the public to have their say in decision-making processes in governance, ensuring that their voices are heard, and enabling duty bearers to make informed decisions based on real public opinion.

Through collaborative ideation, co-creation, development and implementation, the project works with citizen organizations to innovatively deepen understanding about and advocate for meaningful public participation, and with governmental institutions in supporting efforts towards meaningful citizen engagement. Before the commencement of a county-level roll-out of the platform, Youth-Voice for Peace plans to demonstrate to Nairobi County Government public participation officers how the platform works, make them aware of the expectations of the online system, gather their reviews and interact further with the tool on the processes in place in running public participation cycles on the platform. YouthVoice for Peace will leverage on experiences they county public participation officers have gained in running public participation in the county, to help build deeper understanding, and in reference to county policies on public participation, areas of improvement on the platform, to best serve countylevel public participation needs. These will include public participation officers from the 17 subcounties of Nairobi County, the public participation communications lead, the Director of public participation, and representatives from the county assembly. From the discussions, the app will be updated with the new changes before engaging users.

EXPECTED OUTPUTS

The expected outputs for the workshop are as follows:

1. County public participation officers will get information about digital technology in public participation.

2. County public participation officers have the skill to run public participation on the Civic Voices platform.

3. The efficiency of the Civic Voices platform improves based on reviews from knowledge and experiences of the public participation officers, and county government public participation best practices.