Lusaka Goes Transparent

Not so long ago, a Lusaka resident enquiring about the city council's annual budget would be met with a suspicious "Why do you want to know? That information is secret."

Today, however, the council is doing its best to relate to the public - their employers.

Lusaka is one of five African cities to benefit from an e-governance pilot project funded by UNESCO. The other four are Bamako (Mali), Niamey (Niger), Maputo (Mozambique), and Zanzibar (Tanzania). Each city was allocated the same budget.

Electronic governance means that the council is making use of modern technology to get itself better known to citizens. The three-year project began in March 2000 and the first phase is due to end in December this year. Representatives of the five target cities met in Nairobi in 2000 to discuss project implementation, though there has been little interaction since then.

The objectives of the project are to develop the use of new Information Communication Technologies (ICTs);
promote free information interchange and open dialogue between the municipalities and the local communities they serve; to improve the capacity of access to information required for decision-making and to communicate effectively with citizens and public services; to establish municipal information systems based on ICTs; to open municipal services to city populations through ICTs; to build municipal human resources for the use and maintenance of the new information systems; to create a network among African municipalities; to open up African municipalities to the world in order to promote and attract investment.

"At least 80 per cent of the work has been done, despite a number of bottlenecks that were met during implementation. There has been a spirit of teamwork on the project from representatives of the seven departments within the City Council," says project coordinator Judy C Beene, who has been with the council for 14 years and is Information Technology Manager in the Finance Department.

The project was initiated by UNESCO's Nairobi office, its headquarters in Africa. The Zambia National Commission for UNESCO, which falls under the ministry of Education, has provided liaison between UNESCO and Lusaka City Council in the disbursement of all funds and monitoring the implementation of the project in Lusaka.

Also involved have been CopperNET Solutions (service providers on the design and implementation of the LCC website) and are currently hosting the website; Zamtel as hosts for the Internet, and Datchit Technologies (local area network consultants contracted to expand and integrate the existing networks).

A work plan was drawn up at the inception of the project. Phase 1 of the project involved setting up a project environment, procuring equipment, establishing local area networks, training network administrators, setting up Internet connections, establishing a Municipal Public Information Centre, and lastly website design and implementation.

In April 2003 the Lusaka City Council e-governance project contracted the Internet Service Provider (ISP) CopperNET Solutions to design a website for the council. Top management of the council were invited to CopperNET to learn what benefits were to be expected from the website.

The design of the website was decided upon by LCC IT staff, with CopperNET providing professional advice. This was a new challenge for the ISP. The LCC website is the first and the only one operated by a municipal council in Zambia. It is a dynamic website with interactive features such as latest news releases, updated minutes and agendas of Council Committee meetings, and Frequently Asked Questions. Other information provided by the website covers the services provided by LCC, the history of Lusaka, council departments, places of interest in Lusaka etc.

According to Mundia Akolwa of CopperNET Solutions, "The greatest challenge was advising the council about what kind of content the website should contain. Content posed a problem because LCC is a very big organisation and provides a vast array of services to the citizens of Lusaka. As the custodian of the city, the council was supposed to have all the information about Lusaka, but we as developers had to physically gather some content for the website." The minutes of council meetings, posted on the website, give some idea of how the council functions. A similar service was provided in Livingstone by the small magazine The Livingstonian, which printed the minutes of council meetings for the information of residents. Initially some council members objected about the council operations being laid bare, but most realised that it is valuable to have such a check on its activities.

Looking at the Lusaka council minutes one notes that the council still apparently needs ministerial approval to sell its materials store, and to hand over the management of the intercity bus terminus to a private company. Also, one learns that someone was delegated to assess the cost of repairing council vehicles. The result was that the vehicles in question were declared "obsolete", and council staff and members were then given the first option to purchase the vehicles. This could well be justifiable, but it is clear that with the new openness council members will have to avoid giving the impression that they are in it for personal benefit rather than for service. The website will assist in this monitoring process.

Phase 2 of the project, scheduled for 2004, will depend on the outcome of Phase 1. Phase 2 will involve a feasibility study on the extension of the municipal network to city wards; upgrading the municipal network to full Intranet with a wider range of shared resources; training in Intranet administration.

Beyond 2004, Lusaka City Council has committed itself to sustaining the project by providing adequate funding. The benefits will be two-way. By opening up to the public the council will ensure that its functions are better understood, and this should build a rapport that will encourage residents to pay willingly for the services they receive. "E-governance is all about transparency," says Judy Beene. "There are lots of things the council does that the people don't know about." When they do, it will show.

Lusaka City Council Town Clerk Francis M Muwowo, has embraced the new idea of e-governance born out this pilot project and has taken sensitization of his Senior Management team upon himself.

Visit the LCC website at www.lcc.gov.zm