CSOS Launch COVID Fund Tracking Website For Africa

Posted by African Examiner African News, Featured, Latest Headlines Thursday, July 8th, 2021

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – Three frontline social accountability initiatives, Follow The Money, BudgIT and Global Integrity, have jointly launched a website to track funding for COVID-19 pandemic in Africa.

Dubbed, “COVID-19 Africa website”, the initiative which is aimed at providing African citizens with access to evidence on COVID resources, is part of the COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP).

Follow The Money is currently the largest social mobilization and accountability movement in Africa that has advocated, visualized and tracked over USD 15 million for social development across African grassroots communities, directly impacting over 4,000,000 lives. The home-grown Nigerian initiative has chapters in Kenya, The Gambia, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Liberia, and Malawi

Similarly, BudgIT is a foremost civic-tech leading the advocacy for transparency and accountability in public finance across four African countries including Nigeria. BudgIT’s innovation within the public circle demystifies government data, especially on public finance, by either presenting them in simple tweets, interactive formats or infographic displays.

Global Integrity is a non-profit organization that works with government and civil society partners in countries and communities around the world, supporting their efforts to address complex challenges relating to corruption, the use of resources and the delivery of public services.

The COVID Africa Tracking website has flexible navigation and functionality that allows visitors to access all data on COVID in Africa, including intervention resources, funds allocations, palliative distributions, accurate number of cases, data on COVID funds, vaccine management and government’s responsiveness.

Moreover, the website currently displays information on $51.05 billion resources committed to COVID-19 across Africa, $5.08 billion In-Kind Donation as well as over 2,532 COVID Datasets across Africa.

Published resources featured on the website analyse post-COVID economic environment and its impact on marginalized communities. In addition, the COVID tracking site also featured COVID analysis and research resources for seven focus countries which include Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Nigeria.

It also highlights COVID status in these countries and also features knowledge centres on human angle stories curated from citizens across the countries. Built with a focus on user’s experience, it is a comprehensive one-stop website.

In a joint statement on the inauguration of the website, the CSOs urged citizens to utilise the new COVID Africa platform to access data that they need to engage with their governments

Meanwhile, Social Accountability CSOs in these countries are aligning in their mission to hold their respective governments to account, mobilize citizens for social change, counter fake news and misinformation while using digital tools to engage with government accountability issues.

Under CTAP, the 3 Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) seek to advocate and collaborate with governments in Africa to provide and institute proper accountability measures for all financial and material donations received.

Executive Director of BudgIT, Seun Onigbinde said they believe this is also an opportunity for African governments to improve communication with citizens and adopt progressive governance mechanisms in advancing transparency and accountability and regaining citizens’ trust.

Onigbinde noted that in tracking government’s level of responsiveness, “we have shown, through data on the CTAP website, overarching issues such as discrepancies in palliatives and cash transfer distributions, substandard healthcare compounded by the pandemic, disintegration of COVID data, vague procurement processes and blatant corruption by government officials.”

Follow The Money Founder, Hamzat Lawal said the primary goal for designing the website is to improve citizens’ use of data for advocacy and government engagement in a manner that promotes transparency, accountability and open governance.