Advocacy using African Citizens Watch is a powerful way for citizens to hold officeholders accountable for their election promises. This module equips individuals with the tools and strategies to track, analyze, and push for the fulfillment of manifesto pledges. By using the platform effectively, citizens can ensure that leaders honor the commitments upon which they were elected.
Learning Objectives
- By the end of this module, participants should be able to:
- Utilise the African Citizens Watch platform to track government promises, analyse progress, and access verified data for informed advocacy.
- Raise awareness, engage decision-makers, and mobilise action to push for the fulfilment of manifesto pledges using evidence-based approaches.
Let’s Get Started
To begin, understanding African Citizens Watch is essential. The platform is designed to track the performance of African governments based on their election manifestos and policy pronouncements. It serves as an independent source of verified data, enabling users to see what promises have been made and whether they have been fulfilled. Accessing this information helps citizens distinguish between genuine progress and unfulfilled commitments.
The next step is identifying promises and tracking their progress. Citizens must first locate the original pledges made during campaigns. This involves reviewing official manifestos, speeches, and media reports to determine what commitments were made. Using African Citizens Watch’s tracker, users can monitor the status of each promise—whether it is in progress, modified, broken, or fully implemented. By comparing official government reports with independent assessments, users can develop a well-rounded understanding of where action is needed.
Advocacy strategies are critical in turning information into action. One effective approach is raising awareness through social media, opinion pieces, and community discussions. Highlighting broken promises in public discourse ensures that more citizens are informed. Engaging decision-makers is equally important. Citizens can directly contact government officials, participate in public forums, and collaborate with civil society organisations to strengthen their advocacy efforts. Mobilising action through petitions, peaceful demonstrations, and policy engagement adds pressure on leaders to act.
Practical applications reinforce these strategies. Case studies illustrate successful citizen-led campaigns, demonstrating how individuals have used African Citizens Watch to demand action. For example, a community in Zimbabwe used verified data to push for economic policies that had been promised but not implemented. Additionally, participants in this module will engage in an interactive exercise where they select a broken promise, research its status, and draft an advocacy plan.
Sample of some ways to produce content for advocacy
Advocacy thrives when citizens are actively engaged, informed, and empowered to participate in governance. African Citizens Watch embodies this principle by encouraging individuals to stay plugged into the decisions that shape their communities. It is not enough for policies to be dictated from the top—true progress comes when citizens collaborate with their leaders, shaping policies that reflect their needs and aspirations. By holding officeholders accountable and demanding transparency, engaged citizens strengthen democracy and ensure that promises made translate into meaningful action. African Citizens Watch fosters this connection, reminding everyone that governance is not a distant process but a collective responsibility—one in which every individual has a voice and a role to play.
In these episodes of the What If… We Think Differently? Podcast, the discussion revolves around Zimbabwe’s policy-making dynamics, particularly the challenges facing citizen engagement and trust in government institutions. The speakers, Tendai and Eddah, emphasise that the policymaking process tends to be expert-driven, focusing on a narrow set of voices while failing to incorporate broader civic participation. This top-down approach has led to limited trust among citizens, making it difficult for new policies, like the introduction of a new currency, to gain acceptance.
The speakers highlight the need for genuine consultations that include a diverse representation of stakeholders, arguing that the problems faced by the populace are not merely technical issues but are deeply rooted in a lack of trust toward governing authorities. Trust is identified as the central challenge, with citizens doubtful about the legitimacy of their government and its institutions, especially in light of perceived election rigging.
Moreover, the conversation addresses the notion that effective policy implementation requires buy-in from citizens, suggesting that without community engagement, even well-crafted policies are likely to fail. The dialogue proposes that to initiate successful civic engagement, government authorities must adopt a more vulnerable approach, acknowledging past failures and actively involving citizens in problem-solving processes. In conclusion, the speakers suggest a shift in communication styles, advocating for constructive dialogue and recognition of citizens as equal partners in policymaking.