Governance and Transparency

Integrating active citizenship approaches ‘animation’ into Oxfam in Tanzania’s programs has contributed to an increase in the number of citizens especially women participating and engaging in addressing issues that are most relevant to development in their communities. Animators are increasingly becoming influential members in their communities, with basic knowledge on issues such as oil and gas, animators have become community trusted leaders and advocates in holding duty bearers into account. In 2016, citizens in Kilwa, one of our extractives focus areas, demanded for the 20% of 0.3% of service levy paid to the Kilwa district council. Furthermore, women economic empowerment groups in Ngorongoro district are used as platforms for discussion and sensitization on village governance and Violence against women issues apart from focusing on economic empowerment for poverty reduction. This leverages Oxfam’s Chukua Hatua (Take Action) community driven governance reform model and ensures sustainability of the program.

By integrating digital technologies in our programming we are seeing; Community animators interact with high-level authorities on social networks thus link community driven engagement to the broader national policy development and implementation.

200 community animators from four regions have been provided with smartphones together with capacity building on how to retrieve information from the internet and disseminate it to the wider community. The digital technology will also be used to conduct research to determine whether the use of technology (SMS, Twitter, Facebook etc) has impacts on policy, human rights violation and quality of government policies