To infinity and beyond! As Buzz lightyear would say, making citizens’ voices heard is what we strive for. Being able to gather over 100,000 citizen voices on service delivery, has and still is quite a learning experience. Through our work with public service providers in Uganda we have learnt that feedback can indeed be used to create change in a community. As part of our vision to ensure that all public service providers in East Africa use citizen feedback to evaluate their service delivery, we have expanded our operations into Kenya to evaluate what public institutions within the region serve to benefit the most from SEMAs citizen feedback service. The new ground is a great learning experience for all of us at SEMA.
According to a report from Transparency International Kenya much is yet to be achieved when it comes to county public participation within the region. County leaders often rely on online platforms and town hall meetings to engage their citizens in policy making,however these forms of public engagement have not been able to capture quality feedback from citizens at numbers conducive to notable public servic e improvement.. With our real time citizen feedback service, Kenyan citizens will have an efficient method to rate and influence the quality of services they receive from the public institutions they visit.
To help us explore opportunities for such a service in Kenya, we added a Kenya based Operations Manager to the SEMA team.. Since joining, James-Mark Ooko-Ombaka (Operations Manager- Kenya) has engaged with various public institutions in Kenya that have shown keen interest in deploying our citizen feedback service at their public offices. Over the course of the next couple of weeks James-Mark hopes to have secured a partnership with a county government to conduct a pilot of our citizen feedback service at 6 select public offices where we will collect data from citizens and government that would inform the long-term strategy and impact of SEMAs citizen feedback service in Kenya.
During these engagements, we hope to show how integral efficient feedback systems between public offices and citizens are in forming impactful service level changes at public kenyan institutions.
Ultimately we believe that SEMAs citizen feedback service has the strong potential to set a new standard for citizen feedback and public service delivery in Kenya, a service that is made readily available and comes with a low barrier of entry for all Kenyans.
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