Assessing the impact of innovative ICT-based citizen monitoring systems in the context of German Financial Co-operation

The rapid expansion of mobile telephony and mobile Internet in developing countries has the potential to trigger significant social change. New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offer citizens new opportunities to coordinate collective action and to articulate their preferences towards their governments. At the same time, public expectations regarding participation, as well as government transparency and accountability have increased.

A growing number of projects in developing countries aim at increasing citizens’ involvement in political decision making processes via new ICT. However, the empirical evidence a sustainable positive impact of such programmes on good governance is still pending.

On behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the KfW Development Bank is executing projects to support decentralization and good governance in Togo and Rwanda. In the context of these projects, KFW also implements ICT-based citizen monitoring systems. This accompanying research study is intended to continuously adapt and optimize these systems over the course of their implementation as well as to generate operational recommendations on the conception and methodology of innovative funding approaches in the context of German Financial Cooperation.