Wananchi App

The essence of representative democracy is that elected leaders relay the demands and grievances of their constituencies to the center of policy-making processes. When elected leaders reach out to their constituencies and take time to listen and give feedback, the cycle of representation is completed.

Credible survey results suggest that reality falls short of this ideal scenario in Uganda and other developing countries. According to a 2019 Afrobarometer survey, Almost nine out of 10 respondents say MPs “never” (53%) or “only sometimes” (32%) do their best to listen to what ordinary people have to say. Local government councilors did not fare any better in the same survey, with almost three-fourths of respondents saying they “never” (37%) or “only sometimes” (35%) listen. 

This signifies a big disconnect between citizens and their leaders, as citizens cannot communicate with their leaders and, hence, cannot participate in the decision-making of their communities or hold their leaders accountable.

This Disconnect gap breeds grounds for corruption and the provision of services that are not citizen-centric, e.g., in Uganda The total cost of corruption in Uganda is estimated to be UGX 9.144 trillion per year, which is equivalent to 44% of total government revenue in 2019.This cost is paid by the citizens, as they continue to suffer in terms of poor service provision. Experts have reported the numerous health crises facing the Uganda’s children – stunting, malnutrition, and sexual abuse in schools. Nearly 20 percent of Ugandans have never attended school, and nearly a quarter go hungry every day.
This level of corruption cannot be effectively curbed due to a lack of accountability mechanisms that enable citizens to meaningfully hold their leaders accountable.

The absence of these collaboration and accountability mechanisms and their effects is a major cause of citizen dissatisfaction, which suffocates social cohesion and leaves communities vulnerable to poverty,  and internal upheavals  that are detrimental to development.

The WananchiApp bridges the leader-citizen connection, collaboration, and accountability gaps by leveraging mobile apps, USSD, and Web technologies to ensure that citizens directly interact with their leaders, publicly participate in decision-making, and meaningfully hold their leaders accountable at both the local and national levels to build social cohesion and accelerate community development.

The Wananchi APP is communication platform that connects citizens with their leaders to enable meaningful collaboration and accountability for sustainable community development

WananchiApp uses Web and amobile application, and Ai to connect citizens directly to their respective leaders to facilitate their participation and collaboration in decision making, legislative processes, and governance.

To facilitate connectivity with their leaders, WananchiApp has mapped out the whole political leadership structure country-wide in Uganda and embedded them into the WananchiApp platform such that, when a citizen registers on the WananchiApp platform, they are automatically able to connect exclusively to the leaders that represent them. This is being achieved through collaboration with the Uganda National Identity Registration Authority (NIRA) and the Uganda Electoral Commission

With this connectivity, citizens are able to interact with their leaders through direct multi-media messaging that supports text, images, and other data formats to hold them accountable by publicly asking them relevant questions, reporting a pain point, or giving their opinion on on-going legislation. With this, the leaders can respond in real time.

WananchiApp has the following features:

1. Open discussion Posts (by leaders and citizens): WananchiApp allows leaders and citizens to post community-relevant updates for discussion or information purposes. The posts also support hashtags in order to identify what is trending through these key words. These posts support multi-media, i.e., text, audio, video, etc.

2. Direct Messaging: This enables citizens to be able to message their leaders directly and vice versa.

3. Quick polls: This allows leaders to post opinion pools and quickly gather authentic feedback from their direct constituents. This helps make citizens part of the decision-making process of their leaders.

6. AI power information querying: this enables citizens to query any public information about government services, minutes of parliament discussions, budget information, policies, etc., and have their questions answered in real time using an AI tool trained on government public data.

WananchiApp relies on the following technologies:

1. Web technologies (back-end) 2. Android (mobile app) 3.Artifical intelligence 4. SMS 5. IVR (interactive voice response) 6. IOS App

The Wananchi App targets all citizens of voting age who have the right and obligation to participate in the development of their community by participating in decision making, sharing their opinions on policy, participating in planning and implementation of community programs by collaborating with their leaders.

After elections, these voters are systemically limited from communicating to their leaders or conveniently hearing from them. They are left in the dark about the development of their communities and cannot meaningfully hold their leaders accountable or measure their performance against their mandate. In the absence of the right participation and accountability that guarantee proper service provision, the duty bearers take their communities for ransom through all manner of corruption.   

On the other hand, leaders find it expensive to engage their real constituents as it involves high mobilization and travel costs, as well as expensive local radio and TV talk shows. Social media platforms like X and Facebook are limited as they do not guarantee a direct connection to the local voter base, are prone to foreign interference, and have citizen verification gaps; hence, feed back from such platforms cannot be represented as authentic in representing the actual views of a leader's direct constituents. case in point, during the  March 2024 parliamentary exhibition, a social media (X) campaign that was aimed at unmasking the gross corruption in the Ugandan parliament, the speaker categorically stated that she was being targeted by foreign agents because of passing the anti-homosexuality bill. Foreign agents were her obvious excuse for not accounting to Ugandans because citizen verification gaps and foreign interference make present social media platforms unreliable accountability platforms for local governance.

WanachiApp connects leaders directly to their local constituents, who are verified  citizens and voters, to facilitate Authentic multi-media-supported interaction and collaboration as zero cost. 

The Wananchi App is inclusive and supports users of two kinds:

1. High-end users (those who are tech-savvy and can access a smart mobile device or a computer). This segment of users accesses WananchiApp through the web portal and mobile applications.

2. Low-end users (those that are not tech-savvy, who most likely have a simple phone that does basic voice, SMS, and USSD functionalities). These are the majority of users at the base of the pyramid. This segment of users access WananchiApp through USSD and SMS.

Our team is 100% indigenous to the local community in Uganda. Louis, the co-founder and  management lead, and Charles, the tech lead, birthed this solution based on their experience at the hands of community tensions during the ADF war in the western region of Uganda that occurred between 1996-2001.

To implement this project, we have prioritised citizen and leader engagement through the design process. We achieved this through a needs survey conducted in June 2022 with support from the African Union Civic Tech Fund (AUCTF), where 2000 citizens and leaders were asked their engagement preferences and pain points to tailor Wananchiapp to actual citizen needs.

We have fostered collaboration with state agencies in Uganda to ensure proper functionality and implementation. Through support from the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), we have established partnerships with the Uganda Identity Registration Authority (NIRA) for citizen verification and the Uganda Electoral Commission (UEC) for voter and leader verification. 

We have a functional web portal with direct messaging being piloted across regions in Uganda with a growing user base, supporting direct multimedia supported messaging with a growing user base interacting through ussd and SMS.

engagements, though the platform average 600 users for direct leader-citizens interaction per week in the four districts of piloting and 1000 AI users per week using the Ai chat component to querying government information to keep in touch with program implementation in their areas. 

We are seeking connection connection to the right mentors passionate about civic participation , tech powered democracy to support our implementation effort by informing our implementation strategies, providing strategic partnership to expedite the growth and scaling of our solution in Uganda and across other countries. 

We also seek to connect with influencers and implementing organizations in technology, the civic space for learning, knowledge sharing, collaborative implementation, and tech support, among others.

Through Solve we hope to connect to a wide range of partners that can provide monetary support to grow and scale our solution  in and beyond Uganda.  

Our ability to harness various technologies to solve a community and leader engagement problem to promote democracy and community cohesion is what makes our solution innovative. 

This solution is the 1st of its kind to comprehensively approach citizen- leader  engagement so meaningful and inclusively like this. 

We have compined like web, mobile and Ai for tech savvy users, and distilled these engagement for non tech users using technologies like sms and used.

More so our ability to ensure direct connection of verified citizen to only  their direct and verified leaders ensures that  citizen engagement, accountability, etc is directed to the actual leaders responsible for their particular constituencies not any leader/or person,  And that leaders communicate to their actual verified voters form their very constituencies. This guarantees that leaders engage with the right people (voters), which builds trust and limits foreign interference in the activities/conversation of local communities.

The mapping of all elected leaders country wide and connecting them to their citizenry also ensures that leader and citizen communication is decentralised to the lowest level of governance in the community 

Community developement is build on strong structures of democracy that ensure proper leader representation,  accountability, transparency, community lead descision making and citizen cohesion to ensure peace and provision of services that are citizen centric. 

Our solution aims build these structures by connecting citizen with their directly elected leaders for meaningful engagement, accountability and collective  participation in decision making by: 

1. Use technology to inclusively connect verified citizens directly to their respective leaders by a button click

2. Empower citizens with tools through the WananchiApp that support meaningful collaboration, dialogue,  and participation in decision making. This include (public posts that can be used to report citizen pain points, report progress on community projects, make key announcement, mobilize citizens etc., Open discussion forum, a quick pole function for voting on issues discussed in the community, Government information querying through Ai tool for informed citizen participation.

3. Promote  citizen and leader use of the WananchiApp and scale it to other democracies. This is achieve through sensitisation at local and nation level and collaboration with local governments

Though the wananchiApp, citizens will develop cohesion and accountability within their communities and their leaders through which peace and development can be realised.

Impact goals.

1. Increase citizen - leader communication and engagement. Indicator: no of users communication using the wananchi App through web, sms and App. 

2. Increased availability access to government information to empower informed citizens engagement and participation. Key indicators.: number of citizens  querying the wananchi app AI tool for govt information. 

3. Ensure citizen participation in descision making in their communities. Indicator: number of  quick pole issues  created for citizen participation, number of users citizens participating in poles. 

The wananchi app uses the following technologies.

Web. Through a  web  platform where citizens log in to engage with their leaders .this also acts as a back end for mobile app.

Android. And Android app is used by smart phone users to access the application.

Artificial intelligence: an Ai tool this is trained on government data to ensues citizens have quick access to government information. This is accessed through the Wananchiapp.

5 people.

1.Louis Muhindo +256706702920 

2.Muhindo Charles +256700718191

3.Nanteza Christine+256780786642

4. Kabugho Rosette. +256774852621

5. Masika Goreti +256782666632

We have been working on this solution for 28months

Our current team comprises of two males and 3 females. 

Our recruitment is based on Merit, passion towards purpose of the organisation and diversity . 

Our team goes thorough a hearing process that head hanting  capable volunteers for sustainability with out compromising quality of of work and execution.

Our key customers are political leaders, governments bodies and citizens. 

In app Ads

Through our platform, we intend to generate revenue through in app ads. Like campaign ads from political leaders and sanitization ads from government agencies. 

Reports sales

We also provide data and engagement reports to government agencies at a cost to inform planing and  implemention of services.

Government Partnership.

We intend to also partner with government Agencies like parliament to provide budget support as the platform ease their citizen engagement mandate during legislation.

We intend to attain sustainability through partnerships with government and grants.

We have intend to make this platform a nation citizen engagement platform through which all governance and leadership information and discussion can be held. This will be an inexpensive platform for government agencies to  to carry out their information and sanitization efforts. Agencies like the Uganda parliament , the Electoral commision , etc will benefit form the WananchiApp  for which they will be willing to sustainably support. 

We are already expediting a partnership with the Electoral commission through which we have access to officially elected leaders , we shall intent to creat a financial partnership  in the beer future and we increase the wananchi App user base.

We also intend to continuously solicit for grants to help sustain our activities. We already received a grant from the African Union civics tech fund as winners in 2022.