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Kenya's MP watchdog site re-launched

By Tom Jackson
Johannesburg, 20 Feb 2012

A Web site hosting information on Kenyan politicians has been re-launched to provide a more effective analysis of parliament members' performances, months before that country's upcoming election.

The site, called Mzalendo, has information and contacts for MPs, as well as ratings of their performance and accessibility, and a database of their parliament records and constituency information. It also provides information on constituencies and counties, and simple breakdowns of the Kenyan constitution and how parliament works.

Based on the premise of the British Web site “TheyWorkForYou”, which was the first of its kind to put parliamentary data online in a simple form for interested individuals to find out how their MPs voted on certain issues, Mzalendo was first conceived and launched in 2003 by a team of volunteer activists.

Meaning “Patriot” in Swahili, the data site was launched as a reaction to the withdrawal of Kenya's Parliament Web site shortly after it had gone live in the face of complaints from MPs. Conrad Akunga, Ory Okolloh and Jessica Musila have been running the Web site on a voluntary basis ever since, receiving more than 1 000 hits a day.

Recent political changes in the country prompted the Web site's redesign. “We worked with the old site over time and gained experience,” says Akunga.

“The new constitution changed the structure of government, which means we had to overhaul information on the site. We decided to do a complete redesign instead to reflect this based on our experience,” he notes.

They teamed up with “mySociety”, a charity that specialises in running transparency Web sites, to rebuild the site from the ground up.

The rebuild included taking advantage of increased Kenyan access to smartphones by making it available on mobile Web browsers. Information is presented in a much simpler way, while data is synthesised into a “scorecard” for MPs' performance. The public will be able to dispute entries or submit their own information as well.

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